Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile by Rob Bell, Don Golden

From the Publisher

There is a church not too far from us that recently added a $25 million addition to their building.

Our local newspaper ran a front-page story not too long ago about a study revealing that one in five people in our city lives in poverty.

This is a book about those two numbers.

It's a book about faith and fear,

wealth and war,

poverty, power, safety, terror,

Bibles, bombs, and homeland insecurity,

It's about empty empires and the truth that everybody's a priest, it's about oppression, occupation, and what happens when Christians support, animate and participate in the very things Jesus came to set people free from.

It's about what it means to be a part of the church of Jesus in a world where some people fly planes into buildings while others pick up groceries in Hummers.

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Read a Sample Chapter

Table of Contents

Read a Sample Chapter

The first book of the Bible ... Exodus?

Well, yes, and, of course, no.

No, because the first book of the Bible is Genesis. At least when a person picks it up and starts reading from the "in the beginning God created" part.

And yes, because many scholars see Exodus, the second book of the Bible, as the book in which the central story of redemption begins - liberation from Egypt.

Egypt, the superpower of its day, was ruled by Pharaoh, who responded to the threat of the growing number of Israelites in his country by forcing them into slavery. They had to work every day without a break, making bricks, building storehouses for Pharaoh.

Egypt is an empire,

built on the backs of Israelite slave labor,

brick by

brick by

brick.

But right away in the book of Exodus, there is a disruption. Things change. And the change begins with God saying:

"I have indeed seen the misery of my people ..."

"I have heard them crying out ..."

"I have come down to rescue them ..."

"I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them ..."

A God who sees and hears. A God who hears the cry. The Hebrew word used here for cry is sa'aq, and we find it all throughout the Bible. Sa'aq is the expression of pain, the ouch, the sound we utter when we are wounded.

But sa'aq is also a question, a question that arises out of the pain of the wound. Where is justice? Did anybody see that? Who will come to my rescue? Did anybody hear that? Or am I alone here?

Sa'aq is what Abel's blood does from the ground after he's killed by his brother.

The Israelites are oppressed, they're in misery, they're suffering - and when they cry out, God hears.

This is a God who always hears the cry.

This is central to who God is: God always hears the cry of the oppressed.

The cry inaugurates history. It kicks things in gear. It shakes things up and gets them moving. The cry is the catalyst, the cause, the reason that a new story unfolds.

But God in this story doesn't just hear the cry. God does something about it. The exodus is how God responds to the cry.

Think about your life. What are the moments that have shaped you the most? If you were to pick just a couple, what would they be? Periods of transformation, times when your eyes were opened, decisions you made that affected the rest of your life.

How many of them came when you reached the end of your rope?

When everything fell apart?

When you were confronted with your powerlessness?

When you were ready to admit your life was unmanageable?

When there was nothing left to do but cry out?

For many people, it was their cry,

their desperation,

their acknowledgment of their oppression,

that was the beginning of their liberation.

When we're on top, when the system works for us, when we are capable of managing our lives, what is there for God to do?

But the cry - the cry inaugurates redemptive history. These slaves in Egypt cry out and God hears and something new happens. Things aren't how they were. Things change.

These slaves are rescued from the oppression of Egypt.

* EGYPT

In the Bible, Egypt is a place, a country, a nation where the story begins. But it's much, much more. To understand how central Egypt is to the flow of the biblical story, we have to go back to the introduction to the Bible, to the garden of Eden.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from JESUS WANTS TO SAVE CHRISTIANS by Rob Bell Don Golden
Copyright © 2008 by Rob Bell and Don Golden. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---