The Israelites were freed after around four hundred years in Egypt, about one half of that time in bondage. Their heart was not unshackled. Heart means mind, the place of residence in their character and attitudes. They shed the chains that bound hand and feet, but the mental shackles remained. They maintained their traditional slave mentality. They were unskilled in belief. Their disbelief lay in a lack of understanding that prevented them from submitting to God. They always reacted according to the counsel of their Egyptian-trained hearts. Their whole thinking process had to undergo a conversion. They had to learn to be free. All their lifetime up to that point they were subject to bondage. Somebody else was doing their thinking for them, telling them when and where to sleep, when and where to work, when and where to eat, and filling their minds with negative, God-rejecting attitudes. The author of these attitudes that turns people in on themselves is satan, but they willingly reinforce and internalize his ways into their mind to such an extent that they think they are theirs. He imprints on them almost from the day that they are born, and he programs them to believe his lies. Their excessive concern about time and the fears that they would not be provided for express themselves in their lack of trust. They lived for the moment. When pressured by a combination of what they feel is time closing in on them and their fear that God is not going to take care of them and provide for them, they turn back to their own counsel, which had been trained in Egypt. When the crunch is on, they turn to Egypt. They turn to things that they have learned in this world. They fall back on their Egyptian trained hearts. They do not consider the outworking of faith. Israel was a nation driven by bondage to time, driven by their fears but deceived into thinking that they knew better than God.

The Israelites were not free of their slave mentality after leaving Egypt. They still thought like slaves and kept feeding their minds with gripes while actively rebelling to the extent that they yearned to go back to the bondage they had yearned to come out of just a short time before. The problem was in their mind and the way that they thought because they were missing vital elements to God's way. They were totally and completely carnal and almost completely thought only on a human enslaved level enslaved to sin. They rebelled against Moses and God before they even went through the Red Sea because they were enslaved to their thinking. Their bondage stems from the lies which all have followed. Replacing those lies with truth and using that truth produces real liberty and can bring freedom from self, freedom from passing vanities, and freedom from fads and fashions of this world. Before the calling all were bound by ignorance and deception which held them in its grip as slaves of Satan and this world. God made no attempt to convert the Israelites because conversion and salvation is possible only when God actually gives people the opportunity to think in the way that He thinks.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. Billions of people on earth think they are free yet remain enslaved to their own desires, to the dictates of this world, and to the influence of Satan who broadcasts anti-God attitudes. They do not make true choices but are swept along by thought patterns, attitudes, habits, and behaviors that their carnal minds cannot fully reject. They accept and replicate these patterns instead. The world remains held captive by Satan and the false standards he promotes, and only the work of Jesus Christ can break people out of that prison. The ancient Israelites experienced physical deliverance from Egypt yet never truly committed in their minds and hearts, so they remained in bondage to their carnal nature. They quickly turned to idolatry and moral abandon, proving they had not received the freedom that comes through a relationship with God. Modern people repeat this error when they pursue freedom without the standards of God's law. They claim liberty but produce ever-increasing sin, lawlessness, licentiousness, addiction, and bondage. Their so-called freedom leads them further from God and back into subjection.