Metaphysical symbolism of Exodus

Here are a few selected metaphysical meanings of the elements of the Exodus story. Remember: Every person and place represents some aspect of your consciousness. The interaction of the people and elements in the story symbolize the interactions of various levels or parts of our being.


From Let There Be Light, by Elizabeth Sand Turner:

Egypt: the sense level, servant of worldly pride, power, and greed. Metaphysically, man may be said to be in Egypt when he is suffering any sort of limitation, sickness, poverty, unhappiness.

Moses: an understanding of God as law. Understanding of God as law (Moses) must lead man from bondage to liberty (Egypt to Canaan). The Moses faculty in man must guide the unredeemed but aspiring elements of his own consciousness (Children of Israel) from the darkness of sense thought to the light of an increased spiritual realization. From this spiritual height man views the Promised Land, or the good that God has prepared for him.

Charles Fillmore states that Jehovah of the Old Testament and Christ of the New Testament refer to the spiritual self of man, the Spirit of truth, or the I AM, which dwells in him. Therefore, the instruction to Moses was to function from his inner, powerful, spiritual self. "I AM hath sent me unto you."

Moses' rod represents spiritual power.

Pharaoh represent the sense consciousness, which is attached to material things.

The repeated plagues and Pharoah's repeated hardening of heart: We do not overcome Pharaoh (sense consciousness) with one trial. Repeated efforts are necessary, and unless we are willing to try again and again, we cannot free our Children of Israel [unredeemed but aspiring elements of our consciousness] from Egypt.

There comes a time when man makes his escape from the realm of the sense consciousness (represented by Egypt), but he is still far from being on a permanently spiritual level of activity. As Truth students we have left Egypt but have not reached the Promised Land. There is an interim period, typified in the Old Testament by the wilderness, in which we may wander for a long time as did the Children of Israel [for forty years].

From the Metaphysical Bible Dictionary, by Charles Fillmore.Red Sea: A fixed sea of universal thought that has become part of the very world in which we live. We find it as the race belief in life separate from God, and it has taken up its abode in the sense man and forms a part of his physical existence.

This combination of life and substance is the matrix in which all mind force works; symbolically it is the Red Sea or life sea. Human thoughts, which form part of the race consciousness, have impregnated this sea. The Red Sea represents the sum of all the thoughts about life with which the race has impregnated the universal ether...It is familiar to metaphysicians as the psychic realm or race thought, which has to be overcome by the progressive soul.

Exodus: Exodus refers to the deliverance of man's highest religious and spiritual thoughts from the obscurity, darkness, and ignorance of the Egyptian consciousness, or "mind of the flesh." We make our exodus when we die to sin and are born anew to righteousness in Jesus Christ.

Pharaoh :Moses and Pharaoh represent two forces at work in the consciousness–especially that part pertaining to the body. Moses represents the evolutionary force of new ideas that have grown in the subconscious mind, that are tugging at the old states of limitation and material ignorance and trying to rise into a higher life expression. Pharaoh represents the force that rules the body under the material régime. The Lord (Jehovah, as given in the American Standard Version) is here the universal law, the impulse of which is always upward and onward, yet seeking always to preserve equilibrium.

It is found by those who are undergoing the regenerative process, which the Scriptures symbolically illustrate, that these two forces are constantly at work in consciousness, one holding to old ideas and striving to perpetuate them in form, and the other idealizing the new and bending every effort to break away from material bondage and rise above its limitations. Paul says, “The flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.” Looking at it from the personal standpoint, we are likely to cry out in this struggle, “Who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?” But as philosophers in the understanding of the law of change we balance ourselves between these two forces and let them work out under the equilibrium of the universal preserver of all forms, which is the Lord, or Jehovah.

Here is consolation for those who chafe under the whips and the bonds of the regenerative law. They think that the defeats that they suffer and the snail's pace at which they apparently creep along are indications that they are off the track. This is not true; they have only to persevere and wait patiently upon the Lord. If the spiritual could have the ascendancy in you instantly it would destroy your body entirely and you would be left without a working vehicle. The purpose of the spiritual thoughts in the body (Children of Israel down in Egypt) is to raise it up, gradually to infuse into it a more enduring life and substance.

When you affirm the spirituality of the body and yearn for release from the bondage of materiality you are making demands on Pharaoh. Then, in fear that he will all at once lose his hold upon life, he hardens his heart–and sometimes the Lord, or Jehovah, the universal law of equilibrium, hardens it for him (Exod. 8:15; 9:12). Then there seems a failure to attain that which you have tried to demonstrate; but a step has been taken in the all-round evolution of the body and you will find that you are gradually becoming stronger both physically and spiritually. (See EGYPT, JOSEPH, and MOSES in studying the symbology of Pharaoh.)