Counted With the Stars (Out From Egypt, #1)

by Connilyn Cossette

“Yes, a great number of our people have been turning back to the God of Our Fathers—crying out for rescue. Almost as many have turned away, given up. And many doubt that Elohim even hears us. But he does, and he sent a Deliverer!” “Who is Elohim?”

He’d bested the gods of the Nile, the gods of the land, the gods of the sky. Perhaps this god-of-slaves would deliver the Hebrews after all. If he had more authority than all the gods of Egypt, did that mean he was superior to Pharaoh? The Morning Sun, Incarnation of Horus, Son of Osiris? Perhaps Yahweh was even supreme to Osiris, the Lord of the Afterlife himself? Did he have authority over death, too?

“What protected you . . . us?” She pointed at the doorway behind us. The torchlight illuminated a glimmer across the lintel, on both sides of the doorway and across the threshold that I had passed over now twice. “We killed a lamb and painted its blood around the doorway.”

But this god called Elohim, or Yahweh as I now knew him, asked for sacrifice not to please himself or to be appeased, but as a gift to his people, to cover their sins.

No. I refuse to believe it. Yahweh had tossed Pharaoh’s army into the depths. He had forged a path through the sea. I had seen it with my own eyes and walked through on dry land. Yahweh had saved his people over and over. He would not—he could not—abandon them now. A god who had destroyed a country to rescue his people surely would not let them perish.

Calling out to Yahweh in my brokenness had broken the chains.

Yahweh had brought me here into the wilderness to free me, to show me how to leave my idols behind, and to meet the man I would spend my life with. Yahweh cared enough to bring me out of slavery and ignorance, protect me in the desert, and to reveal himself to me in a tent during the middle of a battle. The God who parted the sea could surely mend the rift in my heart.

“I think Yahweh is creating something new from our broken pieces.”