Hosea 11:1
When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called My son.
Matthew 2:15 quotes Hosea 11:1 directly in reference to Jesus. After the flight to Egypt to escape Herod’s massacre, their return is narrated as the fulfilment of the prophet’s words: Out of Egypt I called My Son. Jesus is the true Israel, the Son in whom the entire story of God’s people is recapitulated and perfected. Israel went to Egypt and later rebelled in the wilderness, but Jesus went to Egypt and returned in obedience. Israel failed the test of the wilderness in forty years; Jesus passed it in forty days.
At His baptism, the voice from heaven declares: This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased (Matthew 3:17). The sonship language of Hosea 11 is applied now to One who perfectly fulfils it. When Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness, Jesus responded with the Word of God, quoting Deuteronomy, the very texts Israel failed to live by. He is the Son who loves the Father with all His heart, soul, mind, and strength (Deuteronomy 6:5), fulfilling what Israel could not.
Colossians 1:13 states that God has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son. This is the greater Exodus, not from the slavery of Pharaoh but from the bondage of sin and death. Jesus, the obedient Son, accomplishes through His death and resurrection what the first Exodus could only foreshadow. His Passover is not the blood of a lamb on wooden doorposts; it is His own blood shed on a wooden cross.
Galatians 3:26 asserts that: For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. The Spirit of adoption enables believers to cry Abba, Father, making them co-heirs with Christ (Romans 8:15-17. The calling of the Son out of Egypt becomes the calling of many sons and daughters into the family of God. The singular sonship of Jesus opens the door to our adoption as God’s children.
Hosea 11:1 and its fulfilment assure us that God’s love is initiating and pursuing. As it was with Israel, as it was with Jesus in His humanity, so it is with us: we love because He first loved us (1 John 4:19). It reminds us that where we have failed in obedience, Jesus has succeeded on our behalf. His perfect record is our standing before God.
The greater Exodus means that no Christian is still in ‘Egypt’. Whatever bondage marked your life before Christ, the obedient Son has walked out of Egypt and taken you with Him. You are not a slave; you are a child. You are not called to earn what He has already secured. You are called to live as a child of God who will never stop loving us.
Prayer points:
- Praise God for the initiating, pursuing love.
- Thank Jesus for succeeding where you have failed. Ask for grace to walk in the freedom His obedience has secured.
- Intercede for those still in the bondage of spiritual Egypt that they would hear the call of God and respond to the Gospel.
