How about the slave driver of just one more piece of cake? How about the slave driver of debt?
One of the messages of the gospel is that: hope can flow in situations like that.
Genesis 2:10, this is in the Garden of Eden, and it's kind of making a description of this.
“A river watering the garden flowed from Eden, and from there it separated into four headwaters. The name of the first river was Pishon, and it wound through the entire land of Havilah, where there was gold. The gold of that land was ‘perfect’, and the gold of that land was perfect.”
So ‘out of Eden’, the Talmud says that when Adam and Eve fell, when they were kicked out of the garden, they spent 40 days with their feet in the river Pishon. Now the word Pishon means ‘hope’, so it says: there was a river called Hope, and it wound through the entire land of Havilah. Havilah just meant ‘suffering’. To a Hebrew person, any time you're in the land of suffering, there's a river called Hope somewhere - you've just got to go find it.
The last thing you need to do is give up. To fail, in a Hebrew mindset, is just to quit trying - because if you're in the land of suffering, there's a river called Hope somewhere in it - you've just got to go find it.
When you're in the land of suffering, how do you know when you've come across the river of Hope - because there are lots of rivers in the land of suffering? Some of them are going to take you to places you don't want to go. How do you know when you're in the river called Hope?
It says that you can identify the river of Hope, when there's perfect gold in the riverbed. There's going to be perfect gold in the riverbed. Perfect gold - I think it's called [zebarrelim] gold, it's actually not a gold colour at all - it's a clear substance, and very soft, very soft. If you hold it up to perfect light, only the shortest wavelength of light can get through it, so it looks blue. I've been taught my whole life that the colour of heaven is blue - perfect gold and perfect light looks blue.
It's also very soft, so you can shave it down into powder. You can shave it down into little sprinkles, and if you take one little tweezer, and pick up one little piece of perfect gold, you can drop it into 100,000 parts of water, and it'll turn all of the water blood/ruby red. When perfect gold and water bond, it turns the water blood red (colliodal gold).
If there's a river called Hope, and it's flowing through the land of suffering, and you want to be able to identify the river called Hope, and the river called Hope has perfect gold in the riverbed, what colour is the river? Red!
The Hebrew language originally was pictures. The word gold is three letters; the first letter is the picture of ‘an eye’; the second letter is the picture of a ‘harvester, harvesting supply’; and the third picture is the picture of ‘a house’, or ‘house of God’. So when a Hebrew person read the word ‘gold’ they saw: “Behold, the one who brings us substance for survival, brings it to us in the house of God.”
So a Hebrew person would read: Hope flows through suffering, because behold, the one who brings us substance for survival, brings it to us in the house of God, through a river of blood. To a Hebrew person, when water turns red, hope is flowing through suffering - that is the river Pishon.
Now fast-forward way later: same group of people - they've just gotten larger, and they're in slavery and in suffering in Egypt. They're in the land of suffering; and they cried out to God, because of their suffering, and God decides to do something about it.