Jesus didn't die just to forgive us; Jesus died so we could be slave driver-free: here, now, today.
If you take a Strong's Concordance, and you just do a word study on the word ‘salvation’ or ‘saved’, or ‘rescued’ or ‘delivered’, some 90% of all uses of those words have nothing to do with heaven and hell - it has everything to do with being ‘slave driver delivered’.
Something's ruling my life other than God; and God steps down, without me deserving it, and He takes the slave driver away. My only responsibility in that is: faith, and repentance; to change my mind, so that I don't keep going back to the slave driver, over and over and over and over and over again; that I don't keep opening up my life to the same slave driver.
Every time I open up my life to the same slave driver, Jesus shows up, and He delivers me from it, because His mercy is new every day; but when I choose to truly repent, that salvation is actually here.
Sometimes we can be guilty, in a western culture, of teaching a salvation that's ‘some day’. Some day: the lion and the lamb; some day: no sickness, crying, or shame; some day: no more tears.
It has this aspect to it, and yes - how many of you know that ‘some-day’ is true, that is a true thing? But if we're not careful, we're guilty of teaching a salvation that says: hey, get saved, get saved, get saved - and then one day you'll get to die, and it'll all get better?
The salvation that Jesus is talking about is all about being slave-driver free.
It says: I'm concerned about their slave drivers, and I'm also concerned about their suffering, so I have come down to rescue them. The word ‘rescue’ there is the same word that we get ‘salvation’ from, or ‘saved’.
“I have come down to {save them, rescue them, deliver them} from the hand of the Egyptians; and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”
So in this passage, Egypt represented suffering. This is not just a story about a group of people who've been in slavery for 430 years. It is about them; but it's also a story about me and you, and about our tendency to suffer under slave drivers.
It's a story about suffering, about crying out to God, and about God hearing you in that situation.
When we're in the land of suffering and crying out, we think God doesn't hear us there - that we've done something bad, so God doesn't hear us. Actually, when we're in Egypt, and in suffering and in crying out - that's the exact place that God does hear us. It's a land of slave drivers. It's a place where something is driving our life other than God.
Maybe that driver is anger. How many of us suffer with a slave driver at times of anger? Anger is not an emotion you can afford. When you get angry you lose 25% of your IQ, because all of your blood leaves your brain, and goes to the major muscle groups to prepare for a fight. You also exert a certain enzyme in your brain that helps take away 25% - which for the average person in the room would make you retarded! So if you're married, and you get into an argument, and both of you get angry - you've got two mentally-retarded people trying to solve a problem!
Maybe your slave driver is rejection? Maybe your slave driver is impulse-spending to cope? Has anybody besides me ever bought something you can't afford, with money you don't have, to impress people you don't like? And like a month later the newness wears off, and you're like: I'm still making payments on this, what am I doing!