A few years ago, a man I know was working under his tractor when the hydraulics let go. The drawbar slammed down on his chest, pinning him to the ground, and the hitchpin dug into his stomach. It also knocked over a cup of coffee that was sitting beside him. As it pooled against his side, he assumed that it was his own blood, and that he had been impaled. He yelled for his wife, but she was inside the house a few hundred yards away, and couldn’t hear.
He spent the next half an hour or so praying, preparing for what he assumed was his inevitable death. But slowly he realized that the hitchpin hadn’t broken his skin, and that while the drawbar was pressing him to the dirt, it wasn’t actually crushing him. This discovery, he said, was actually pretty irritating. He’s a Christian; he was prepared to meet the Lord. But he wasn’t prepared to spend the night flat on his back under the tractor. He figured he’d have a smoke, but his pipe and matches were on a table on the far side of the shop. And to cap it all off, he watched as the lights in the house went off one by one. His wife had gone to bed. It was only the next morning that she noticed he was gone, and went looking for him.
It’s no fun to be stuck, in a jam with no idea how you’re going to get out. That’s true whether you’re caught under a piece of machinery, or in a dead-end job; whether you’re stuck with bills you can’t pay or a marriage that’s falling apart or kids that are ungrateful. You exhaust all of your options – you try everything, and nothing works. And then you start to lose hope. You wonder whether God is paying any attention to you at all. Maybe he’s just lost interest.
That must have been how the Israelites felt as they stood there on the shores of the Red Sea, hemmed in before by water, and behind, by the Egyptian army. There was nowhere to run. As far as the Israelites could see, they were either going to drown or be cut down. And whichever it was, it was going to be soon. You get a sense of their desperation in verse 11 of Exodus 14: “They said to Moses, ‘Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness. What have you done in bringing us up out of Egypt?” And then they indulged in a little creative re-write of history: “Is not this what we said to you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone that we may serve the Egyptians’?”
Well, hardly. But you can understand their frustration. They never expected to be in this predicament. They had left Egypt in triumph. After ten plagues, each more horrible than the last, their neighbors were literally begging them to leave. The Egyptians were so desperate that they actually gave their silver and gold to the Israelites – in other words, they paid them to get out of town before some other calamity befell their country. Pharaoh himself ordered them to go away. After four hundred years they were free. It was the fulfillment of all of their hopes, all of their prayers. It was glorious. No longer were they under the Egyptians’ thumb. They were marching on God’s orders now, with a pillar of smoke and fire to lead them, headed for the promised land.
Now, the thing about walking in the paths of the Lord – following where he leads – is that he almost never takes you the easy way round. I’ve often wondered whether church bulletins shouldn’t have some kind of warning in them, that if you’re only concerned about this life, and you’re looking to breeze through on the path of least resistance, Christianity may not be for you. If we were being perfectly Biblical, we’d pat new believers on the back and give them a laminated copy of Jesus’ warning from Matthew 10:
“Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves… Beware of men, for they will deliver you over to courts and flog you in their synagogues and you will be dragged before governors and kings for my sake… Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child… and you will be hated for all for my name’s sake.”
It wouldn’t be much of a church growth strategy, I admit. But at least it would be honest. The fact is that to be a follower of the Lord, to do it faithfully and to do it well, is going to earn you more than your fair share of opposition. The world tells you that you are what you buy; that your highest goal should be material comfort; that you should be able to do what you want, live and die at your own command; that all religions are equally true, or untrue; that no one can claim to know the absolute truth. Christ, on the other hand, says that he is the truth; he calls you renounce your selfish desires, to take up your cross and follow him; to lay up treasure in heaven and not on earth; to walk by his spirit, guided by his word; and to bear witness to the world that no one comes to the Father except by him. You can see the problem. There’s no question it would be easier, speaking in human terms, to live the world’s way. In fact, when you lay things out like that, the Gospel doesn’t have much going for it – except that it happens to be true.
If you set out to follow the Lord, be warned: he won’t take you the easy way. There was actually a very nice road, a highway even, that led straight from Egypt to Canaan. But the Lord didn’t take the Israelites that way. There’s another road, through the desert, that’s rougher and narrower. The Israelites started out that way, but in chapter 14, verse one, it says that the Lord told Moses to “turn back” and camp by the sea, at a place called Baal-Zephon. That, my friends, was the hard way. In fact, it was so hard that in order to get to Canaan, you’d first need to teach every man woman and child in Israel to swim.
And things got worse. After the Israelites left Egypt, Pharaoh had a change of heart. He set off after them with his army, and there at Baal-Zephon, by the shore of the sea, he caught up with the fleeing slaves. This is what the Israelites were complaining about: far from delivering them, the Lord had led them to a dead-end, a hopeless trap. He had let them down.
Like I said, you can understand the complaint. I can guarantee that everyone in this room has felt like that at one point or another. But if you read Exodus 14, you notice that in their gloom and doom, the Israelites had overlooked a few very important things.
The most important was that the Lord was still with them. He had been, the whole time. It says at the end of chapter 13 that he went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them; and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light. In chapter 13, verse 22, it says that “the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night did not depart from before the people.” And when Pharaoh’s army showed up there on the shore, the pillar of fire was placed between it and the Israelites, protecting them.
It’s tempting to imagine, when you’re in a real scrape, that somehow God has forgotten you. But it’s not true. It’s just the opposite – we forget God. He promises never to leave nor to forsake those who love him. He promises that he never slumbers nor sleeps. If the Israelites had simply looked up at that moment, and seen the pillar, they would have known it. If we’re willing to open our eyes, we’ll see it too.
Now, if God had wanted to, he could have driven the Egyptians away. If he had wanted to, he could have whipped up a sandstorm to keep them occupied out in the desert. But that’s not the way he works. The particular grace of God is not in making our problems go away. It’s not in giving us a way out of our difficulties. That’s the human response. Don’t like your job? Quit. Don’t like your marriage? Quit. And so on.
The particular grace of God – his glory, the demonstration of his power and his love – is not in making a way around seemingly intractable problems, but in making a way through them. He did that for Israel. Rather than send the Egyptians away, he sent away the sea, so that where before lay certain death, the sons of Israel walked safely.
God makes a way where there is none. Nowhere do we see that more clearly than in the work of Christ. What obstacle is there more daunting, more terrifying, more intractable than death? For thousands of years, men have tried to scheme their way around it, to no avail. But by his death and resurrection, the Son of God made a way through it. And now, for those who belong to him, for those who trust in him, the old terrors are done away forever.
That was part of the plan here in Exodus. God wasn’t just trying to get his people out of a tight spot. He had set out to save them. Completely. He explains it in verses 17 and 18: “I will harden the hearts of the Egyptians so that they shall go in after them, and I will get glory over Pharaoh and all his hosts, his chariots and his horsemen. And the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord…”
And so it was. The sons of Israel watched as the waters closed over the Egyptians. It says in verse 30 that they saw the bodies washed up on the shore. And there was no question who had saved them. There was no way for them to do it themselves. The glory belonged to the Lord.
It’s tempting to despair when you find your back up against the wall. Don’t. Know that when you’re following the Lord, he’ll almost never take you the easy way. Know that by his Spirit he’s with you, come what may, to guide you and protect you. And know that it’s his particular grace to make a way where there’s no way, even through death itself, that he will get the glory. Be still, and watch him work his salvation, through Jesus Christ. Amen.
