Matthew 2:14–15: “Then he got up, took the child and His mother during the night and went to Egypt. He stayed there until Herod died. In this way, what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet was fulfilled: ‘I called My Son out of Egypt.’”

This is talking about how Jesus Christ fulfilled a prophecy of Hosea, where God said, “Out of Egypt I called My son” (Hosea 11:1), originally talking about Israel. Israel became a prophetic symbol of Christ.

And what exactly happened to Israel?

The powerful deliverance that God wrought to bring the children of Israel from bondage to the promised land is like an eternal illustration for the Christian life (Exodus 12–14). And so Jesus Christ Himself became that picture, because we come from Him, we are in Him—we died in Him, we rose up in Him (Romans 6:3–5). So “Out of Egypt I called My Son” becomes a picture of our own deliverance too, of being called from Egypt, of being called from the house of bondage, of the kind of work that God had to do to rescue us from darkness and bring us into light (Colossians 1:13).

You see God saying Israel is His son. With Pharaoh, God said, “Israel is My firstborn son… Let My son go” (Exodus 4:22–23). God was in a confrontation with Pharaoh saying, “This is My son. My son has to go.” And in the process of God saving His son, bringing His son from Egypt, there was damage done to the enemy.

So the same thing with the devil. “Egypt,” you can call it the death that Jesus Christ experienced—the death, the humiliation. God brought Him out from that in the resurrection (Acts 2:24), and that damaged the enemy (Colossians 2:15).

We see it again with the words of God in the first chapters of Genesis, where after the sin of man God said the seed of the woman will crush the serpent’s head and the serpent will bruise His heel (Genesis 3:15). We see the confrontation there at that time too: the serpent and the seed of the woman. We see that same conflict, that same thread of confrontation, which begins to tell us the story of salvation that culminated in the death of Jesus Christ on the cross.

My focus here, though, is the fact that Egypt—what does Egypt stand for? Egypt stands for loss. Egypt stands for damage. Egypt stands for the house of bondage, as we see in Scripture (Deuteronomy 5:6). And God, we see, calling His Son out of Egypt. That is history. But when He started talking about it in Hosea, He looked ahead at Jesus Christ, just as Matthew will write that Jesus is the fulfillment of calling His Son out of Egypt.

And I am also saying: because He called His Son out of Egypt, because He is our representative as the second Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45), in Him we have also been called out of Egypt. You have been called from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light (Colossians 1:13). You have been called out, just as Lazarus was called out from the grave (John 11:43–44). So the grave, you can say, was his Egypt—a place of darkness, a place of bondage, a place of loss. But he was called out by an act of God. God called him out from Egypt, called him out to a new place.

So in Christ we have been called out. We were in Him when He was called out. Just as His birth is a picture of our spiritual birth too: He was born of the Spirit, we are also born of the Spirit (Luke 1:35; John 3:5–8). That is an argument for the virgin birth, because the normal course of things is that a child comes from the father and the mother. But this One is different because He was conceived by the Spirit, and that becomes a picture of our own spiritual birth.

We see spiritual birth also mentioned in John 1, where John wrote that as many as believed in Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God—children “born not of blood, or of the will of the flesh, or of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12–13). That points to spiritual birth.

And I am saying that the fact that Jesus Christ was called out of Egypt, because we are in Him, illustrates our call out—our call from wherever we are in darkness, in bondage to sin. We have been called out to be children of God.

God bless you. See you later.