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From the very first verse of Exodus we have been moving
toward this climactic event from which the book derives its title. This is the Exodus! The word “Exodus” means
literally, “the road out.” And the road out of Egypt for the Israelites leads
right through the middle of the sea.
Imagine what it must have been like for the Israelites. Egypt was a
place of suffering and slavery, but it was all they had ever known. All of
these Israelites were born there, and they’d never been anywhere else. Their
ancestors had come to Egypt
some 430 years before. To put that into perspective, that’s about the same
amount of time since European settlers first came to America . Now God has announced
through Moses and demonstrated by His judgment of ten plagues that the time has
come for them to be delivered and taken to a land about which they have heard,
but to which they have never been. It belonged to them by promise from the Lord
to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and all their descendants. And so they set out by
faith to the promised land.
The Israelites soon discovered that the way out would not be
easy. It would be fraught with difficulties. They took the long way around
rather than the shortcut, and found themselves hemmed in by the sea in front
and the Egyptian army in back. Many began to murmur and complain, asking Moses
why he didn’t just leave them to die in Egypt rather than bringing them out
into the desert to perish. But Moses’ response is profound. In 14:13-14, Moses
said to them: “Do not fear! Stand by and see the salvation of the Lord which He
will accomplish for you today; for the Egyptians whom you have seen today, you
will never see them again forever. The Lord will fight for you while you keep
silent.”
Like the Israelites, we too were born in slavery, but our
slavery is to the power of sin, under the tyranny of Satan. But God has come
down in the person of Jesus Christ to lead us out of this bondage and into the
freedom of life with Him as we make our pilgrimage to an everlasting home in
heaven that has been promised to us. The journey is fraught with many hardships.
As Acts 14:22 says, “Through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God
In the Exodus, the Israelites were to see the salvation of the Lord. And as we look at this passage, we
are able to see for ourselves the salvation which the Lord has provided for us
in Jesus Christ. So, how do we see this great salvation?
We see the salvation of the Lord as we …
I. Trust His saving promises
Our God is a promise maker, and because He is God, He is a
promise keeper. He has never made a promise that has not kept or will not keep.
God began making promises to mankind at creation. One of the first was this: In
the day that you eat the fruit from the forbidden tree, you shall surely die.
Eve was unwittingly deceived, and Adam willfully disobeyed, and they ate the
fruit. But immediately God made a saving promise.
He said that there would come a Redeemer from the seed of woman who would crush
the head of the serpent by His own suffering. Generation after generation, God
continued to reiterate His saving promises. He promised to give Abraham many descendants,
and to those descendants a land that would be theirs forever, and through those
descendants His blessing would flow to all nations. It was by faith in God’s
promises that Abraham was reckoned as righteous before God. Isaac and Jacob,
likewise, placed their faith in God’s saving promises. So confident was Joseph
as He trusted these promises that, as he lay dying in Egypt , he made his kinsmen swear an oath that when the day came that God would lead
them out of Egypt ,
they would take his bones with them. Joseph knew that God’s promises about the
land, the nation, and the Redeemer who was to come would not fall to the ground
but would come to fruition. So when Israel
emerged from Egypt
carrying only the bare essentials for their journey, they saw to it that
Joseph’s faith in God’s promises was honored and they brought his bones out
with them.
Joseph’s faith would be an example for the Israelites as
they embarked on the exodus journey. They had become heirs of the same saving
promises, and they had to trust them. Just as Joseph died believing that God’s
promises would not fail to come to pass, they had to believe that God’s promise
to deliver them would be fulfilled, no matter how things looked. God did not
lead His people out of Egypt
and into the promised land by the well-traveled, shorter path. He led them the
long way around. And He did not take them out of harm’s way. He led them right
to the very place where they would have nowhere to look but upward to Him by
faith. But they didn’t. They murmured against God and against Moses, insisting
that it would have been better for them to remain in slavery in Egypt . This is
when Moses told them, “Do not fear!” The antidote to fear is faith. When we
believe that God’s promises will always come to pass, there is no room for
fear, no matter how bad things look.
Friends, as we journey through our own exodus pilgrimage, we
do so trusting in God’s saving promises. He has promised us that if we are in
Christ, we have life abundant and everlasting. There will be days when we feel
that God must have forsaken or abandoned us. There will be moments when we
question if He really knows what He is doing. There will be times when we think
that if God really loved us, He would not be bringing us to the edge of
disaster and destruction, and we will fear. But the Word of the Lord admonishes
us to not be afraid, but rather to trust in the promises of God – His saving
promises – which will always come to pass. As we trust in His saving promises,
we will see the salvation of the Lord.
Secondly, we see the salvation of the Lord as we …
II. Experience His Saving Power
An ocean in the front, and an army behind – it appeared that
Israel
had two options: be drowned or be decimated. But Moses said to them, “Stand
by!” What? Stand by! That’s the last thing we can afford to do at a time like
this. The sea isn’t going anywhere and the army is fast approaching. There must
be something we can DO! No, Moses
says, “Stand by.” He says, “The Lord will fight for you while you keep silent.”
So two pieces of advice: “Stand by” and “Shut up.” And as the Israelites did
this, the Lord would save them by fighting their battle for them.
After saying this, Moses must have cried out to the Lord for
help. The Bible doesn’t say that he did, but 14:15 says that the Lord told him,
“Why are you crying out to Me?” Did you know that there comes a time when we
need to stop praying! Sometimes we continue crying out to God about things He
has already done, and things we need to just believe and trust. So God tells
Moses that He has heard enough from him and the Israelites, and He says, “Tell
the sons of Israel
to go forward.” But “Forward” is toward the sea! That can’t be right. Even
Moses does not yet know what God is about to do. Just tell them to go forward.
And then the Lord said, “Lift up your staff and stretch out your hand over the
sea and divide it, and the sons of Israel shall go through the midst
of the sea on dry land.” And it happened just as the Lord said! The Bible says
that the waters became like a wall on their right and left as they passed
through on dry land. This is something only God could do!
Meanwhile God began to fight their battle with the Egyptians
for them. He had been leading them by a pillar of fire at night and a pillar of
cloud by day. When Moses stretched his staff over the water, the pillar of
cloud circled around to the backside of the Israelites and stood between them
and the Egyptians holding them back from advancing while the Israelites began
to march through the path God made in the middle of the sea. And when the
Israelites emerged on the far side of the sea, the Lord removed the barrier
between them and the Egyptians. The Egyptians began to follow the Israelites
into the sea, but God threw them into confusion. They suddenly confessed, “the
Lord is fighting for them!” That is exactly what He said He would do, and He
was doing it. As they tried to flee, they became mired up in the mud, and God
gave the order for Moses to stretch out his hand again over the sea, so that
the waters came back in and swallowed the Egyptians and destroyed them. When
God fights for us, He always wins.
Now you have probably heard the various theories espoused by
some critics of the Bible. They will say that there was no miracle here of the
parting of the sea, but rather that the Israelites passed through a shallow
swamp, maybe about six inches deep. If the power of God was seen only in the
passing through of the Israelites, I suppose theories like that could cause us
to stumble in our faith. But, these critics of Scripture seem to remain
oblivious to the fact that the same water through which the Israelites passed
also swept over the entire Egyptian army and killed them. So, while I do not
believe that the Red Sea crossing was a trek
through six inches of swamp water, even if it were, there is still a miracle
here, for God caused the most powerful army in the world to drown in that six
inch swamp. All such naturalistic attempts to explain away the miraculous in
this text fall flat. No matter where we place the crossing on the map, or what
the conditions of that crossing were, we are seeing here the salvation of the
Lord as the Israelites experienced His saving power. This was something only
God could do, and He did it by fighting for His people to save them.
Friends, you and I were at one time in an even worse
predicament than that of Israel
on the banks of the Red Sea . We were separated
from God by an impassible gulf of sin. And the holy wrath of eternal judgment
was advancing in on us quickly. But hallelujah, the Lord Jesus stepped in to
fight for us and save us! He placed Himself between us and the wrath that our
sins deserve and stretched out His hands over the sea of our iniquity as He was
nailed to the cross. He took the penalty for us, parted the flood of judgment
that we might walk through on the dry ground of His mercy to forgiveness and
righteousness on the other side. And just as the very same waters both saved
the Israelites and destroyed the Egyptians, so the cross of Jesus Christ
accomplished deliverance for the elect of God and defeat for the enemy of God.
There at the cross, the seed of woman delivered the crushing blow to the head
of the serpent forever. Colossians 2:15 puts it this way: “When he had disarmed
the rulers and authorities, He made a public display of them, having triumphed
over them.” Sin is washed away, Satan is defeated, not because anything we can
do or say. Our job is like that of the Israelites: Stand by and shut up! Cease
striving, and cease boasting, and see the salvation of the Lord as He fights
for you by His saving power in the bloody cross of Jesus Christ!
Now then finally we see the salvation of the Lord as we …
III. Celebrate His saving purpose
The Westminster Catechism, a nearly 400 year old theological
document, begins with the famous question: “What is the chief end of man?” And
the answer given is that the chief end of man “is to glorify God and to enjoy
Him forever.” John Piper took that question and put a different spin on it:
“What is the chief end of God?” And the answer: “The chief end of God is to
glorify God and enjoy His glory forever.”[1]
That sounds somewhat abrasive to our sensitivities. It makes God sound like
some kind of megalomaniac. But, consider it from this vantage point. Our chief
end is to glorify God and enjoy Him because to glorify or ultimately enjoy
anyone or anything other than God would be idolatry. There is nothing or no one
who is more worthy of such unrivaled devotion. So, if God were to exist to
glorify or ultimately enjoy anything other than Himself, I think the universe
would explode. God would Himself become an idolater. If we pursue our own glory
it is vanity. For God to pursue His own glory is fundamental to His being, for
there is no higher person or thing to glorify than Himself. Piper says that he
first began to think along these lines after reading the great Jonathan
Edwards. Edwards said that God is “infinitely the greatest and best of beings.
All things else, with regard to worthiness, importance, and excellence, are perfectly
as nothing in comparison of Him. … All that is ever spoken of in the Scripture
as an ultimate end of God’s works is included in that one phrase, the glory of God.”[2]
We need look no further than this passage – though we could
look to almost any and every passage – to see it demonstrated. In 14:4, God
says, “I will be honored through Pharaoh and his army, and all the Egyptians
will know that I am the Lord.” He says it again in verse 17: “I will be honored
through Pharaoh and all his army, through his chariots and his horsemen. Then
all the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord, when I am honored through
Pharaoh, through his chariots and his horsemen.” So, get this … God is working
to bring honor and glory to His own name, and He is using Pharaoh and his army
to do it. He is using the very ones who are determined to defy Him and oppress
His people to bring glory to Himself! And the way He brings glory to Himself
through them is by devastating them in judgment. The same flood that destroys
the Egyptian army is the one that stepped aside at God’s command to allow His
people to pass through it on dry land. And on the other side, ransomed from
slavery, saved from destruction, delivered from the judgment that swallowed up
the Egyptians, they gave glory to God! Verse 31 – “When Israel saw the great power which
the Lord had used against the Egyptians, the people feared the Lord, and they
believed in the Lord and in His servant Moses.”
Friends, if you are a follower of the Lord Jesus, consider
where you came from. Consider the great lengths to which the Lord Jesus went to
save you, chasing your sin to Calvary and
throwing Himself in front of the bullet of wrath that was intended for you.
Consider what would have become of you without His divine intervention – here
and now and for all eternity. Consider how intricately and meticulously He
choreographed the circumstances of your life, down twisting, turning, broken
roads that led you to the cross where you found grace and new life. And
consider how he has laid low the enemy of your soul by the death and
resurrection of Christ. There should not be a moment of our existence in which
there is NOT a proclamation of praise
on our lips. We have been saved by His grace, and we have been saved for His
glory. 1 Peter 2:9 admonishes us to proclaim the excellencies of Him who has
called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. He saved us that we might
glorify Him. And He will bring glory to Himself even through the worst of your
circumstances and the most vehement opposition so that His glory may be
manifested and magnified in all the earth.
Of course, there is a word here for those who, like Pharaoh,
seek to defy the Lord in hard-hearted opposition. Romans 1 says that God has
made Himself known to all men sufficiently in creation and conscience to
prevent anyone from having a valid excuse for not turning to Him in faith. But
Paul says there that “they did not honor Him as God or give thanks.” You must
consider Pharaoh here, who refused to give God the glory He is due. Nevertheless,
God got glory through him anyway. He was glorified through bringing judgment
upon Pharaoh. So the lesson for us all is this. God will be glorified through
you. He will either get the glory from your life by redeeming, or by breaking
you. But know this, He is a warrior who fights for the purpose of His own
glory. And when God fights, He always wins. So, in this season of grace, while
God is affording you the opportunity to turn to Him in faith and repentance,
bow the knee to Him and confess Christ as Lord of your life. Let Him be
glorified in your redemption rather than in your destruction. But be certain …
He will be glorified.
See the salvation of the Lord! Stand by. Cease your efforts
to earn His favor by your own deeds and doings. Remain silent. Be done with any
and all boasting of your own goodness and your own spiritual opinions and
theories. God has come into the world in Jesus Christ to fight on your behalf
that you might be saved, and that He might be glorified.
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