Anxiety-Driven Theology: pt 2

This is the second blog in a series on Israelite idolatry, anxiety, and the spiritual seduction of Empire.

The Old Testament tells the story of a people delivered from slavery who nevertheless struggle to stop thinking like slaves of Empire. Again and again, Israel reaches for the same things Egypt promised: visible power, political security, economic stability, and control over fear. Their problem is not merely the worship of pagan gods, but the deeper impulse to remake YHWH (capital G God) in the image of the pagan systems that make them feel safe.

The central tension of Scripture is not simply God versus idolatry, but Eden versus Empire: covenant trust in the presence of God versus anxious dependence on imperial power.

In the previous blog, I argued that Genesis ends with a strange discomfort: Jacob (whose name is Israel), the descendant of Abraham, is always fixated on Joseph, the future ruler of Egypt. Jacob’s family survives through Joseph’s rise to power in Egypt. What begins as God’s provision during famine slowly becomes Israel’s place of settlement, ownership, assimilation, and permanence. Egypt saves them. Then Egypt begins to form them.

This is where the story gets uncomfortable, but needs to be noticed.

When people read the opening of Exodus, they may assume Jacob’s descendants are faithful worshipers of YHWH trapped inside a foreign empire. But the Old Testament gives us a more complicated picture. Israel was not merely surrounded by Egyptian paganism; they absorbed it.

Ezekiel says:

On that day I swore to them that I would bring them out of the land of Egypt into a land that I had searched out for them, a land flowing with milk and honey… And I said to them, ‘Cast away the detestable things on which your eyes feast, every one of you, and do not defile yourselves with the idols of Egypt; I am the LORD your God.’ But they rebelled against me and would not listen to me; not one of them cast away the detestable things on which their eyes feasted, nor did they forsake the idols of Egypt.
Ezekiel 20:6-8

That is a devastating indictment.

Israel was worshiping Egyptian idols before the Exodus. They were not simply waiting faithfully for God’s promise while biding their time in Egypt. They had become entangled in Egypt’s religious imagination.

This does not justify Pharaoh’s oppression. Israel’s idolatry does not excuse tyrannical abuse. The Bible never asks us to spiritualize away the real violence of oppressors. 

But Scripture is doing more than telling us that God rescued innocent people from bad people. It is showing us a people who had become advocates of the very system that eventually enslaved them.

And perhaps we know more about that than we want to admit.

We do not mind getting our meals from a tyrant as long as we are not the ones being beaten. We do not mind the megalopolis as long as our home, business, preferences, and freedom rest comfortably inside its walls. We do not mind Empire when it feeds us, protects us, affirms us, and lets us keep our gods.

This story of assimilation is foreshadowed centuries earlier in the life of Israel’s famous ancestor.

His name, at the time, was Abram. And his story is a preview of Israel’s story.

When we first meet Abram, YHWH calls him to leave Haran in Mesopotamia and go “to the land that I will show you” (Genesis 12:1).

Pay attention to the geography. It matters a lot.

Abram is called out from the world beyond the Euphrates, the region associated with Mesopotamia, Babel, and the old world of ancestral gods. Later, Joshua tells Israel what Genesis only implies:

Long ago your ancestors—Terah and his sons Abraham and Nahor—lived beyond the Euphrates and served other gods. Then I took your father Abraham from beyond the River and led him through all the land of Canaan and made his offspring many.
Joshua 24:2-3

Abram is not a Noah-like figure, faithfully worshiping the true God while surrounded by a corrupt world. Abram is part of that world. He comes from a family that served other gods. His call is not only a change of location; it is a rupture from inherited worship, inherited security, and inherited identity.

Before God calls Israel out of Egypt, He calls Abram out of Mesopotamia.

Before Israel needs an exodus, Abram needs one.

But then famine strikes Canaan, and Abram journeys down to Egypt, just as Jacob’s family will later do through Joseph. The pattern is hard to miss. Famine drives the chosen family toward Egypt. Egypt offers survival. Egypt also threatens the promise.

When Abram realizes he must stay there, his anxiety takes over:

When he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, ‘I know well that you are a woman beautiful in appearance, and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, “This is his wife”; then they will kill me, but they will let you live. Say you are my sister, so that it may go well with me because of you and that my life may be spared on your account.’
Genesis 12:11-13

If this sounds like a stupid move on Abram’s part, it is.

But it is more than stupidity. It is regression.

Abram is called out of the world of pagan power, but under pressure, he immediately starts thinking like the world he came from. He does not trust the promise. He manages the threat. He calculates survival. He offers Sarai into Pharaoh’s household so that his own life may be preserved. As uncomfortable as it sounds, it was common in the ancient Near East for absolute monarchs to take foreign women as property.

In a moment of anxiety, Abram acts according to the logic of Empire.

That does not mean Abram formally worships Egyptian gods. The text does not say he bowed to a gold statue of Pharaoh. But he does something painfully familiar: he reaches for self-preservation in a way that treats another person as expendable. And that is how Empire always works. Someone else becomes the cost of my safety.

Abram’s fear exposes his formation.

Babylon still lives in his heart, and Egypt brought it to the surface.

This is where Joshua’s covenant speech becomes so important. In the same chapter where Joshua names Abraham’s idolatrous past beyond the River, he also commands Israel:

Now, therefore, revere the LORD and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the LORD.
Joshua 24:14

Joshua links the two old worlds: the gods beyond the River and the gods of Egypt.

Mesopotamia and Egypt.
Abram’s past and Israel’s past.
The world of ancestral idolatry and the world of imperial dependency.

Both must be renounced.

God’s people are not simply called to leave pagan places. They are called to be stripped of pagan formation.

And that stripping almost always happens in the wilderness.

Abram journeys from Mesopotamia toward Canaan. Israel journeys from Egypt toward Canaan. In both stories, the journey is not wasted space between deliverance and destination. The journey is the surgery. The wilderness is where God begins cutting Empire out of the heart.

And Israel does not go quietly.

When they are barely out of Egypt and see Pharaoh’s army chasing them, they cry out to Moses:

Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, ‘Let us alone so that we can serve the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.
Exodus 14:11-12

Right before they say this, Exodus tells us they were “in great fear.”

There it is again.

Anxiety drives them back toward the very Empire they begged God to rescue them from.

Our new freedom feels dangerous; slavery feels familiar. The wilderness feels cruel; Egypt feels predictable. The presence of God feels insufficient when Pharaoh’s storehouses once made life feel great.

This pattern continues:

If only we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the pots of meat and ate our fill of bread.
Exodus 16:3

Then again:

If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.
Numbers 11:4-5

This is Israel craving the sensory world of Egypt: its foods, flavors, abundance, predictability, and comfort. The manna of God feels boring compared to the diet of Empire.

They want Egyptian cuisine over wilderness healing.

They do not yet realize that the wilderness is designed to strip them of the very dependence they keep romanticizing.

God is not simply moving Israel across geography. He is retraining their appetites. He is teaching them that bread does not ultimately come from Pharaoh’s ovens, water does not ultimately come from Egypt’s irrigation systems, and safety does not ultimately come from imperial power.

This is why Deuteronomy later tells Israel that Canaan will not work like Egypt:

For the land that you are entering to possess is not like the land of Egypt, from which you have come, where you sow your seed and irrigate by foot like a vegetable garden. But the land that you are crossing over to possess is a land of hills and valleys, watered by rain from the sky.
Deuteronomy 11:10-11

Egypt had the gods of the Nile. 

Caanan will not operate that way.

Egypt trained people to trust the visible machinery of provision. Canaan would require dependence on rain from heaven. The land itself would become a discipleship environment.

Israel wanted God’s promise, but they also wanted Egypt’s security. They wanted deliverance from Pharaoh, but not deliverance from the world Pharaoh ruled. They wanted God to remove the cruelty of Empire while preserving its comforts.

And honestly, don’t we?

Our fear drives us back into the arms of whatever power promises temporary safety. We baptize our anxieties. We sanctify our survival instincts. We dress our idols in biblical language so they feel Christian enough to keep.

And before we know it, we are not worshiping the God who calls us out of Egypt. We are worshiping the systems of Egypt with God’s name written on top.

That is anxiety-driven theology.

It is what happens when fear becomes the room where we build our doctrine of God.

And the tragedy is that we rarely notice it while it is happening. We do not usually abandon God outright. We simply ask Him to bless the world we already trust. We clear Egypt’s throne and invite God to sit on it.

And when He says, “no,” we ask Him to give us back our garlic.