Halting Toward Zion – 7-20-20 Prince of Egypt (Part 3): Of Liberty and Liberation

Emily:  Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson, here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome, and today we’re talking about the exodus – specifically, the exodus as co-opted improperly in liberation theology, and as understood correctly as gospel history; that is, an event in redemptive history that foreshadows the gospel, as well as images it in different ways.

Greg:  And brings us one step closer in history to the coming of Christ. We need to be careful that we don’t just look at the Old Testament and see images and symbols, but we see real history moving us forward toward God’s goal of bringing his son into the world.

Liberation theology is with us in a number of new incarnations that are in our streets of late. It’s good Hegelianism, it’s Marxianism, it’s the attempt to take two facets of society, get them mad at each other, throw them together, and produce something in line with your agenda on the other side. This is what Marxism has always done.

What made liberation theology a little special when it came into existence in the ‘60s was that it used Christian language. Now, that’s not wholly new with Marxism and communism. Communism always co-opted the language of the gospel – liberation, justice, peace, the idea of linear history moving toward a greater society where everybody will love one another and everyone’s needs will be met.

All that is rooted in Christianity, but in Latin America in the ‘60s and ‘70s it became popular for priests – most of whom had actually been trained in American or European seminaries, and in fact were Westerners to that extent; they weren’t necessarily home-grown – to begin painting the language of Marxism with Christian language. “God is on the side of the poor. God is here to take away from those who would oppress you, and to liberate you.” It sounds great if you don’t listen too closely and when you stop comparing it with God’s law.

One proponent basically expressed it this way. “If you have more money than everybody else, you obviously got that by oppressing them, so we need to take all of that away from you, send you packing, and there you go. That’s liberation. Isn’t it great?”

It’s hard to distinguish that from old-fashioned communism or basically the Mafia moving in on you, but because it’s done in the name of Jesus, and because there are so many Christian images and metaphors piled into it, a lot of people thought, “Well, this is just good Christianity. Finally, Christianity is getting serious about helping the poor.”

It was not uncommon in this movement to grab the exodus, which is, within redemptive history, the great point of liberation, and co-opt it, as you said, as the paradigm for Marxist/socialist liberation everywhere. “Oh, that we could all be like what God did there, where God knocked down the ruling powers, took their stuff, and freed his people!” Wait a second, his people. Hmm. They actually tended to say things like, “freed an oppressed people, or freed a poor people.”

What we want to talk about tonight is what the exodus actually was in terms of God’s plan, in terms of redemptive history. We need to swipe it back from them, slap their hands and say, “No. You may have your agendas, but you may not borrow from us to promote them. You may not borrow from Jesus to promote theft, violence, and terrorism in his name.” So we’re going to talk a little bit about the exodus, which everyone knows about because we’ve all seen the Hollywood pictures, right?

Bryan:  Which obviously exist in a social vacuum apart from any interpretation by people influenced by the thing we’re talking about.

Greg:  Yeah, and as we look at it we say, “Oh, that’s just wonderful. There can be miracles if you believe.” Let’s see what it was.

When God comes to Moses on the back side of Mount Sinai in the burning bush, he announces his intentions to deliver his covenant people, the children of Israel, descended both by blood and by covenant from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the patriarchs to whom God had sworn by his own life that he was going to bring the Messiah into the world to be a savior to all peoples. “In thee will all the families of the earth be blessed.”

And more than that, God had given Abraham something of a timeline. “You’re going to be persecuted by a foreign power for about 400 years, and you’re going to go into slavery there. In the fourth generation you’re going to come out again, and I’m going to judge that nation and bring you into the land of the Amorites, the land of Canaan, and give you that land because the earth is mine and I can do that.”

The issue here is not Israel’s socioeconomic status. The issue is their covenantal status. God, out of sheer grace, has covenanted with a people who weren’t the nicest people in the world. By the time we’re done we’re going to see that. These weren’t wonderful cuddly people that you just would love to have over for tea. They gave Moses and they gave God a really hard time, and yet God in his eternal faithfulness will not break his word.  He sends his messenger, his prophet, to deliver them.

We’ve talked a good deal about Moses in the last couple podcasts, so as we look at this we should consider how he comes before Pharaoh. First, he comes in the name of Yahweh, Jehovah, the God of Israel, the God of our fathers, the God of the Hebrews.

Pharaoh is really cool. “I don’t know this guy Yahweh, neither will I let Israel go.” It’s probably not true. He probably had heard of Yahweh, but he didn’t want to acknowledge his existence or any claim from him. He probably also knew exactly who Moses was. He was a former prince of Egypt from another royal dynasty.

He’s thinking religiously, to be sure, because religion is his life and soul, as well as the foundation of his political power, and therefore he’s thinking politically. “If I acknowledge the existence of this God of theirs, then that changes the ground rules for everything. I’m no longer the unique representative of the gods on earth. I’m no longer god walking on earth, so this God thing can’t be relevant, and therefore I won’t even acknowledge its existence. So Moses and Aaron, go away.”

What we have from the beginning is a challenge of two religious worldviews – one based on the transcendent Creator, the triune God of scripture, who covenants with men and makes promises that he has promised by his own life to fulfill, and we have this institutionalized form of continuity of being worship, where man himself is god and is part of all things, but therefore able to control all things with magic. Man can do what man can do. Man can save himself. Man can create the ideal social structure, which of course was Egypt. Ask Pharaoh. You could ask a common Egyptian too and he would agree because he didn’t know anything else, and if he got out of line he’d probably be in a lot of trouble.

So these are political systems that are at war, but fundamentally they’re religious systems – not even merely philosophical systems or worldviews in the broad sense. This is personal commitment either to Yahweh or personal commitment to Pharaoh and the demonic forces that lie behind him. This is where the battle is joined. This is not about the oppressed and the oppressors except secondarily or tertiarily.

That’s important to understand. This is not God coming to rescue “an oppressed people,” “a poor people.” This is God coming to rescue the people he has chosen for himself, despite any merits or demerits of their own. They’ve got a lot of demerits going on.

Emily:  That reminds me of the blurb that goes around on social media now and then that says, “Jesus was a Middle Eastern peasant who upset the religious leaders of his time and was killed unlawfully by the government” or something – all of this sort of making Jesus an icon of this other thing that they want to represent.

Greg:  Yeah, he’s just like our absurdities. Well, there are some superficial resemblances because man is not original. Man always thinks God’s thoughts after him. He thinks them either correctly if his mind is conformed to scripture and enlightened by the Spirit, or he corrupts them and he makes false gods and false Messiahs. Of course, the best lies are those that have the appearance of some kind of truth.

Emily:  So just as Jesus is really important because he’s God, and he’s God’s Messiah that he sent to us, in the same way the story of the exodus is important because it’s the story of God saving his people and setting aside a people for himself and building a house for himself – a house for his name, to borrow a phrase.

Greg:  Yes. And again, to thus prepare the landing pad for his son. His son is going to come to Canaan. He’s going to come to Mount Moriah, from the story of Abraham we’ve already learned. “In the Mount of the Lord it will be seen,” it being God providing himself a sacrifice.

So Israel has got to get back to it – the right people, the right time, the right place. History and geography have to coincide so that God can save his people, and it’s not even these people particularly. We’re going to come back to that. Their temporal redemption from Egypt is key, but their eternal salvation isn’t so much.

God does not need these particular souls in order to ensure the coming of Christ, but he does need to move them geographically, politically, and nationally from where they are to the next place in his scheme. Some of these people will be saved for eternity, and many of them will not enter into God’s rest. We’ll come back to that.

The second thing then is the command that Moses gives to Pharaoh, or the request or plea, depending on how you want to look at it. “Thus says the Lord God. The God of the Hebrews has met with us,” just so there’s no lack of clarity about who we’re talking about. “Remember Joseph? His God? He wants us to go three days into the wilderness, and there worship him and hold a religious festival, a feast.”

The request is never, “Let us go from slavery.” Now, that’s implied, and Pharaoh knows it’s implied, because the moment some other God can tell him what to do with this people, then this people obviously must belong to another God. He’s lost possession, he’s lost control, he’s lost any say, and he can only guess what’s going to happen from there. Them leaving would be one of the best of the alternatives. This God could order them all to turn on him and kill him. He would have an enemy people, a people loyal to another God within his own borders. Nothing works here for Pharaoh.

Once you recognize that people have a higher calling to serve a different God and you give in to that, you have to be ready for all of the possibilities, and they’re political, sociological, economic, and military, and Pharaoh was not going to do that. He is not going to acknowledge an ultimate authority other than himself.

Again and again as Moses comes and says, “God says, ‘Let my people go that they may serve me, that they may worship me,’” Pharaoh continually resists. When he begins to slip a little, there are all these compromises.

“All right, worship your God but worship on my terms. Stay in the land.”

“Okay, well, worship but only take the men. Leave your women and children behind. Don’t bring them under the scope of your God’s role.”

“Okay, so your family is going, but leave all your stuff. We get control of your stuff.”

One by one he makes concessions as Egypt is falling down around him, because he knows that once he says “Go,” it’s all over. It’s game, set, match. His last fleeting attempt to send out the army to try to grab them, in the face of everything he’s seen, is sheer insanity, but there comes a time when insanity is a pretty good move. When it’s the only card you’ve got left to play, why not? Go be a psychopath and get everybody killed.

From Israel’s point of view, God is saying, “You’re mine, and you being mine means you’re going to worship me. Your worship of me is the thing that marks our relationship.” God is not just freeing Israel so they can be free. He’s freeing them for worship or for service – that is, for obedience.  He’s already told Moses that when they’re free they’re going to go to Mount Sinai and he’s going to give them further instructions. He’s going to give the law at Sinai.

So again, over against liberation theology, it’s not freedom for freedom’s sake. It’s not freedom so that you can go and do your own thing and find your own way and rebuild your own society. The exodus was to free God’s covenant people for worship on God’s terms, and obedience to him in all of life in terms of God’s law. There are no similarities here.

Last time we also talked about how the exodus was a war on Egypt’s gods. I don’t want to repeat all of that, but both as the Egyptians conceived of them – nature spirits who controlled this sphere or that sphere; the river, the land, the multiplication of frogs, etc – God snatched that all away. But on the secondary level, and the far more important one ultimately, the demonic forces that empowered the magicians – God plucked that right out of their hands. He completely left the Egyptians disillusioned with their religious faith.

This is very much a religious event in the highest sense of the word. He’s not simply after the money and the property of the Egyptians. He’s after their religious faith. While many end in disillusionment, many are converted and recognize the God of Israel as the true Creator God and they leave with Israel, so it’s also evangelism – evangelism through judgment, something we don’t talk about a whole lot anymore.

Now, it is true that God also destroyed Egypt. We can again go down the line. He destroyed the crops and the cattle. He had the Israelites confiscate all their treasures and jewels and gold and such. He poisoned the drinking water and, in the end, destroys their army, the heir to the throne, their Pharaoh, and at least one male in every household. That’s not even counting all the other people who died as collateral damage.

He leveled Egypt and, though he did pay Israel for her years of bondage – the laborer is worthy of his hire – he does not leave Israel there to say, “Well! Got rid of your overlords and got rid of your oppressors. Now, go enjoy, pillage, plunder, and have a grand old time in Egypt. It’s all yours. I’ll check in with you later.”

Emily:  Or rebuild it or redeem it.

Greg:  Yeah. “This is waste. This is gone. You’re going elsewhere. This is not your future.”

But before that last move comes the death of the firstborn, the last of the plagues. Here, God’s judgment stood not only over Egypt, but stood over his covenant people too. He would not take them with him into freedom unless they were covered by the blood of the Lamb.

They had to kill a lamb, one for each household. They had to roast it and eat it with unleavened bread and to eat it quickly with their shoes on their feet and their staff in their hand, as ones ready to take off and leave. But before all that, they had to take the blood of that lamb and splash it on the sides of the doors and the lintel above, and place themselves by conscious covenant –

Here it wasn’t enough that, “We’re circumcised.”

“Yeah, you are. Your fathers believed. Your fathers circumcised you. Where’s your faith? Time to show it. Time to lay your hands on the Lamb and to go hand-in-hand with the Lamb into the promised land.”

And only those who were marked by the blood of the Lamb, who household by household came under that blood, were free from that final judgment as the angel came through, destroying the firstborn in every household. Here even the Egyptians could join in. If the Egyptians wanted to splash the blood of a lamb on their household, they too could be saved, and apparently some were.

So as we look at this whole thing, again as you said, Emily, at the beginning, this is an incredible picture of what God would do 1500 years later in the person of his son, because Jesus entered Jerusalem on the 10th of Nisan, this first month of the new ordering of months, the day that the Passover lambs were selected to be scrutinized, to be watched, to be sure they were without blemish and without fault.

Then on the 14th, when the Passover lambs were being sacrificed, our Savior went to the cross. He went to the cross as the sacrifices began with the morning sacrifice. He gave up his life as the sacrifices ended, and he gave his blood as atonement, propitiation, and redemption from sin. So all of this for a start, but Jesus didn’t stay dead. He came back from the dead. He rose again, so his whole life was an exodus.

When Jesus stood on the Mount of Transfiguration with Moses and Elijah, Luke tells us that he spoke of the exodus which he should accomplish at Jerusalem. His death and resurrection were the true exodus, the true fulfillment of this, because he’s our covenant representative. He takes with him, in his death and resurrection, us as well, so this is all patterned out for us.

Jesus’ whole life and ministry, his incarnation through his death and resurrection and ascension, the giving of the Spirit and his current reign are God judging the world, judging modern Egypt, and rescuing his people, people by covenant, people who put their faith in the blood of the Lamb.

This is not the gospel that liberation theology preaches, but it is the gospel that’s here. And again, it’s not merely a pattern for the gospel or symbols of the gospel, but if these things historically had not happened, if Israel had stayed in Egypt, there would be no people in Canaan to greet Messiah and to work out the story of redemption that God had planned.

Emily:  It’s the means by which God accomplished that greater salvation. God keeps doing this in the Bible. As I’m reading through it this year – as I mentioned, I’ve fallen woefully behind; I’m trying to catch up in my Bible in a year plan – but time after time God is accomplishing his purposes in ways that tell you what that purpose is going to be. I think you’ve said it before. It’s the greatest mystery novel, except that it’s true. It’s really wonderful.

Greg:  Coming back to something I kept hinting at, this generation left Egypt in the exodus, were baptized in the divided waters, fed by God with bread from heaven, heavenly bread. He gave water out of the rock. They go to Mount Sinai, they’re given the law of God, God sets up his home in their midst, the tabernacle. He comes and descends and lives in their midst and walks with them and takes them to Canaan.

It’s the perfect ending to the story! Except that’s not how the story ends because they get to Canaan and then they say, “Giants! Uh, we’re not going in there. You’re trying to get us killed! I know, let’s go back to Egypt! That would be so great! We had garlic and onions and leeks in Egypt.” Yeah, that’s a reason to go back to being slaves.

Bryan:  Garlic and onions are great, but…

Emily:  Do you know the song by Keith Green?

Greg:  Oh yes. “So You Want to Go Back to Egypt?”

Emily:  Yes. So good.

Greg:  The writers of Hebrews spends some time with this in Hebrews 3-4, where he points out that this generation had the gospel preached to them, but the gospel that was preached in all of these figures and types and by the clear words of the promise that God made to Abraham did not work faith in their hearts. It was not received in faith. It was not mixed with faith in the hearts of those who heard, so they were barred from God’s rest.

When they said, “We’re not going in,” God said, “Fine, you’re not.” And they thought for a second and said, “Wait.”

Emily:  “Wait. We definitely want to go in. We’ll obey now.”

Greg:  “We’ll obey. We’ll go in.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Yeah, we will! Watch us!”

And the Canaanites stomped on them and they came back out bloodied and with a lot of dead, and God said, “Where were you? Oh yes. Your spies were there for 40 days. That earns you 40 years of wandering in the wilderness while the younger generation grows up.” The younger generation endures boot camp in the wilderness for 40 years, so the kids that were 18, 19, 20 – 40 years later they’re 59 or 60 and they’re finally ready for the next step.

But that whole generation, the writer of Hebrews says their carcasses fell in the wilderness. They did not enter into God’s rest, with very few exceptions. Aside from Moses, the two we know about – well, Aaron and Miriam we can assume – but beyond that we’ve got Joshua and Caleb, the two faithful spies. It may be that there were others, but the writer of Hebrews is not terribly hopeful on that.

The message seems to be that that entire generation that was liberated was only liberated outwardly. They were not saved from their sins. So when they met the challenge of giants and cities walled up to heaven, they weren’t ready for the battle and they thought in terms of Egypt. “Let’s go back where someone else can take care of us and meet our needs and we don’t have to. We don’t have to be responsible people of faith. The government can solve our problems.”

Bryan:  If we want to bring that back to liberation theology, because they focused so much on liberation from Egypt in worldly political terms, completely divorced from the spiritual, it’s kind of odd that they would focus on that, given that if they got their way and they were allowed to foment some kind of revolution that resulted in a political exodus in the modern era, the end result of that allegory is that they’re going to die in the wilderness.

Greg:  I think that Emily has pointed this out, or somebody has pointed it out lately, maybe somebody in our Bible study now that I think about it – that we don’t know the Bible very well. American Christians do not know the Bible very well. We know it as something like a series of Aesop’s fables or fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm.

It’s always kind of cute when Hollywood starts grabbing the various fairy tales and throwing them into the same universe and we’re all pleased with the continuity. “Oh, you mean Snow White actually knows Cinderella? That’s kind of cute. I like that!” but I think that is probably a reflection of Christian thinking. We want the continuity. We want the single universe – morally, for certain.

Every story a Christian tells should exist in God’s universe in the sense that God’s law is binding, and that human beings are human beings, sinners in need of a Savior. But when all the stories start coalescing, then it reminds us of something, but unfortunately it doesn’t remind us of the Bible enough because we look at the Bible and it’s still, “Well, there’s this story and there’s that story,” and the average Sunday School child cannot tell you how one story leads into another. They can’t put them together as history, and there’s an awful lot they plain don’t know.

I think that probably a lot of Sunday School kids would know the story of Israel not entering the promised land because they will be reminded of Joshua and Caleb, the two faithful spies. I think that story sticks. And they would know the exodus to some degree. I don’t think that they bridge the stories, though. “These people that God rescued? They’re the ones who get lost in the wilderness and die of unbelief.” Do we really make that part of the story clear, or are we just throwing up blurbs of Christian fairy tale without following the history and seeing the spiritual covenantal cause and effect that ripples all the way through it?

I think not. I think that may be the answer, Bryan. We’re really good at just grabbing images and moving them around.

Bryan:  Even just in terms. In both stories we hear “God rescued Israel from Egypt,” and then we also hear, “Israel entered the promised land,” and it’s like we’re forgetting that these are two different Israels that are happening in time.

Greg:  Yeah. Covenantally they’re the same people over history, but in terms of individuals they certainly aren’t. A whole generation has passed.

Emily:  And then that theme gets picked up when it says, “Not all who are of Israel are of Israel.”

Greg:  So there’s a lot to be said for covenantal thinking at this point, and covenantal thinking is necessarily historical thinking. The more we understand Bible as a covenant book, the more we will express the historical continuity of God’s redemptive acts within our history, within our timeline, within our geography, and we will not be misled by people waving banners that say justice and freedom and liberty and equality and such things – love, acceptance, approval.

Bryan:  Liberté, égalité, et fraternité.

Greg:  Or morte – death – was the other part that no one ever quotes in that little slogan. They were very serious. “You’re going to love me or I’m going to kill you.” We’re talking about the French revolution, in case anyone missed that one.

With that in mind, let me bring this down to very contemporary relevance. We’re not so enmeshed in Latin America as we were in the ‘60, and problems that were once those of other countries are now not only in our streets, but at our front door.

The kind of thinking is still very much the same. “Let’s create a conflict.” The oppressors are easy to find. They’re the ones who coincidentally are the heirs of Christian civilization. Whether or not they are faithful in that is something else again, just as God’s people in Egypt weren’t exactly faithful. They were worshiping idols and the first three plagues hit them, too. Then later the whole generation apostatized. So just because you’re the heirs of a great tradition doesn’t mean anything for your personally, except greater responsibility.

But still, as Pharaoh recognized, these people who have this relation with this Creator God that we don’t want to talk about, they’re the threat, so here’s the target. Here’s your oppressor class. Here’s people who have stuff. They have money. They have position. They have privilege. “Let’s find people we can make into their enemies.”

I’m going to recommend an article on Herbert Marcuse later. Marcuse in the ‘60 served in the University of California system until Ronald Reagan fired him or got him fired, but he was the one who began to see the possibilities in finding new yins for yangs – new dark sides for light sides.

“Let’s try the young alienated students who are afraid of fighting in a war. Let’s try blacks who already have a grievance. Let’s try women, who right now simply want equality of pay. What can we do with that?” and he began basically charting out the future of the century that would follow, saying “Here are our target groups. Let’s get them to think of themselves as the oppressed and let’s start throwing them at the oppressors, and then let’s make the oppressors feel very bad that they’re the oppressors. Let’s guilt-trip them so they surrender. Let’s take away any proper pride of identity, any proper thankfulness for the gifts God’s given them, and let them just throw up their hands and turn it all over, and then we can rewrite the social structures,” which has been the goal of socialism from the beginning, from the French revolution and before.

This is something we’ll come back and talk about a lot, I should think, over the next weeks and months.

Emily:  Final thoughts before we switch to recos?

Bryan:  I can’t decide which of the two things I have left here I want to recommend, so I’m probably going to recommend both of them. The first thing I’m going to recommend is a series of videos on YouTube which are lectures by the fantasy author, Brandon Sanderson. He’s giving lectures on writing.

Brandon Sanderson is one of my favorite contemporary authors. He is a Mormon, which means he’s very good at writing fantasy worlds.

Greg:  Ohh! I saw that coming and still didn’t believe it when you said it. All right, go on.

Emily:  Just wait until we talk about Scientology.

Bryan:  But he is a very talented writer. He’s very good at writing character development and he’s very good at coming up with unique characters as well, and also his action narrative is second to very few, and none that I can think of off the top of my head. We’ll include a link to the playlist of those in the show notes.

The second thing I want to recommend is a Mark Twain essay which I discovered last week or the week before. I don’t think I’ve laughed quite so hard in many, many months, because it’s called “The Awful German Language.”

I am a gigantic fan of German. I studied it right out of high school and initially had dreams of studying at a university in Germany, which probably somewhat for better did not come to pass. It’s filled with your standard Twain witticisms and mockery, including a very humorous line. He talks about how the word ze means her, she, they, them, it, its, theirs, hers and his.

He says, “Imagine the sheer poverty of a language that would force a single word to pull nine times’ duty compared to other words, and a wee little thing of three letters at that. That’s why whenever someone I do not know approaches me on the street and says ‘ze’ to me, I try to fight him, if a stranger.”

So I recommend that. If you know any German, or even if you don’t know any German, you’ll probably find some humor in it. But if you know German, there’s a lot more to laugh at.

Emily:  It’s oddly prescient too, with our kerfuffle around pronouns these days.

Bryan:  Just say ze and it covers every base.

Greg:  I too will now recommend two things, because your German thing just reminded me of something else I stumbled across today. The first is by Dinesh D’Souza, who probably isn’t in favor right now, but I don’t care.

Emily:  He’s rarely in favor. We like him anyway.

Greg:  He wrote an article called “Philosopher of Antifa” and it is an explanation of the influence of Herbert Macuse in the 60s. What I said earlier I largely pulled from this article. I learned a lot from this and I think it’s worth your time just to understand why things are happening the way they are, and why it just kind of congealed overnight, it seems. It’s been in the making for a long time.

There comes a point where when everything is set, you throw your first thing and it doesn’t work, and your second thing is right in the wings and ready to come, and your third thing, because the basic presuppositions – the Hegelian idea of antithesis into synthesis – is there. Find your black and white, throw them together, make the gray, and push the agenda forward. That black didn’t work? Let’s find another black, or let’s do some green and yellow. Let’s just keep throwing them, keep everybody off-balance, and eventually we’ll get what we wanted all along, which is the destruction of Christian civilization because it’s just yucky and we hates it.

On another front, oddly enough, from another enemy of the faith but an intelligent one, George Orwell. I found this, something my daughter Emily sent me a long time ago. It’s Orwell on politics and the English language. Bryan, you remember this one?

Bryan:  I actually just had someone link me to this today.

Greg:  It’s “Politics and the English Language.” In 1946, Orwell starts by giving five just random quotes – one from a book called Politics, another from Interglossia, a communist pamphlet, another a letter to the Tribune – and he just sets it down here. Let me just read you an arbitrary one.

Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder.

Your response would be, “What was that?” He’s trying to tell you to speak simply. He failed.

Anyway, Orwell goes through very quickly and very simply a philosophy of paring English down to simple words that people can understand, and that will make you stop sounding like a pompous ass. It’s fun and, in following Bryan’s lead, I recommend “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell.

Emily:  My recommendation is a movie with Steve Martin called A Simple Twist of Fate. It is a retelling of the story of Silas Marner, which I think I read an abridged version of in high school. I think David read the actual book or something more like it, and he really enjoyed that story. I think it was a family favorite. My dad has liked this movie for a long time, so we watched it this week and it just hit the spot. It was light enough that it is a welcome escape from a lot of the troubles that we’re all dealing with right now, but true enough to life that there is sadness and redemption and just good stuff in this movie.

Greg:  So does Steve Martin not play himself?

Emily:  He actually acts in this one. I mean I enjoyed Steve Martin most of all in his appearance on The Muppet Show.

Greg:  Doesn’t everyone?

Emily:  Kind of Alice Cooper in that respect.

Greg:  Have you ever seen him in The Spanish Prisoner?

Emily:  No.

Greg:  I recommend that, and I’ll tell you why. It’s a serious mystery crime period piece, and I think you might enjoy it if you’re ready for surprise endings that may or may not please. Anyway, there we go.

Emily:  Hang on, you all got two recommendations each. Come on, play fair. My second recommendation is another movie that we watched this past week. We were housesitting for my parents down in rural Virginia and we watched Holes, which is an excellent adaptation of an excellent children’s book – young adult fiction, I’d say; it’s not quite a children’s book – that deals with a lot of heavy issues, and does so in a really spectacularly good story-telling setting. So A Simple Twist of Fate and Holes – two recommendations from me.

Bryan:  What I’ve always loved is the fact that children’s stories can touch on true things so much more than adult movies, because adult movies are so pretentious about themselves. Even ones that are just sheer entertainment, they just take themselves so seriously at it. There’s very rare moments of whimsy in adult comedy.

Emily:  They’re also really unwilling to commit. There’s always this cynicism or self-awareness like, “Ha! Isn’t that funny? We thought it was funny, too, because it’s not like we really cared about this story or anything. We wouldn’t be that dweeby. I mean what nerd sits around and writes the script of a movie? Not me, definitely.”

Bryan:  They’re too self-occupied with winking at the camera. That’s my social hot take.

Emily:  We just painted with the broadest brush ever, so we clearly don’t like any movies except for kid’s movies and books. Well, with that, this has been a wonderful conversation and I look forward to picking it up with you guys next week.

Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to our listeners. If you want to jump in on this conversation, send us comments, comments, or insults – maybe light on the insults – just kidding, send us your insults at haltingtowardzion@gmail.com. I don’t read the emails. David reads the emails. That’s why I can say that.

Greg:  Say good night, Emily.

Emily:  Good night. See you next week.