REFUSING THE SCRIPT # 3
# 1 > Even when a message is persuasive or popular, we should think twice about buying in.
Politicians, sociologists, and marketing executives all know this fact: We're taught to live by scripts__stories we are fed that seek to prescribe the truth about our lives. For example, a global telecommunications company has engineered an entire advertising campaign around the prevailing myth that "bigger is always better." And certain versions of the American Dream provide a prevalent narrative: To be content, we must secure a house, car, and lucrative job . . . and then secure a large house, a shinier car, and even more lucrative job. Another common script insists we must exert great energy, under threat of calamity, to hold on to our life.
# 2 > This storyline conveys that it's necessary to secure our own happiness and vigilantly protect our well-being against anyone we view as a threat. We fear those of a different ethnicity, political persuasion, or socioeconomic status, eyeing them with suspicion instead of moving toward them in love. How much of the violence in our midst erupts because we operate out of fear and the scipt of self-preservation?
READ EXODUS 1:9__10, 17
This false script has been with us for millennia, and it made an appearance in Exodus 1 when Egypt's Pharaoh incited his people with threats of insecurity and catastrophe. Behold the people of the sons of Israel are more and mightier than we," he said, stoking the fires. "Come, let us deal wisely with them, or else they will multiply and in the event of war, they will also join themselves to those who hate us, and fight against us and depart from the land" ( EXODUS 1:9__10, ).
# 3 Disaster looms, Pharaoh insisted. Our way of life is in danger. We've got to strike first and protect what is ours. While there may have been some truth to his anxiety about Egypt's slave labor growing too powerful for the overseers to control, it seems he was exaggerating the danger. The script he was following says everyone's a threat and the primary objective is to clutch our power or resources. He obviously realized nothing garners support for an empire-building agenda like a little does of mass hysteria. So he concocted a sadistic plan to have the Hebrews midwives kill the male Israelites babies as they emerged from the womb. When we let misleading, idolatrous script play too long, there's no telling the inhumanity or evil that will surface. But a pair of Hebrews midwives refused the order, Shiphrah and Puah "feared God, and did not as the king of Egypt had commanded" ( Verse 17 ). Believing their life was in God's hands rather than their own, they looked to the Lord, not to the king. Though courageous obedience would put their life in jeopardy, these two brave women flipped the script. And history honors them as heroines__rebels against the powers of this world. The text specifically identifies Shiphrah and Puah, but it never gives even a whisper of Pharaoh's name. Only his empty title. This unnamed ruler fades into oblivion, a casualty of the seductive script that ruled is life. However, these women and their staunch faith embolden us, millennia later, to obey God rather than the distorted stories that ask for our allegiance.
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