Virgil Hurley
3902 Vista Campana North, Unit 1
Oceanside, CA 92057
760-433-6436
Email: uglydogpro@earthlink.net
LOOK BACKWARD, BUT GO FORWARD
Exodus 14:10-15
A recent San Diego Union story featured theoretical physicists debating the existence and meaning of reverse causation—a theory that speculates EFFECTS producing CAUSES instead of CAUSES producing EFFECTS. That would mean the watch made the watch maker. The theory involves the possibility that time can, with equal facility, move backwards or forward.
However possible theoretically the theory has ZERO practical use except for academic speculation. The earliest recorded Bible teaching says that God determined the forward flow of time in history by creating from DAY ONE to DAY SIX, with all their minutes and hours increasing from smaller to larger numbers. That first use of time determined all succeeding perception of time. Which relates to our passage.
The Setting
Beginning with Exodus 12:37, God moved Israel from Rameses approximately 35 miles southeast to Succoth, then north towards Etham on the Egyptian frontier. They seemed poised to enter the Arabian peninsula when God directed them farther north towards Pi Hahiroth, where they staked tents between Migdol and the Sea of Reeds, with Baal Zephon on the eastern shore.
Egypt meanwhile faced social and economic chaos as work formally done by unwilling but skilled slaves fell to unwilling and incompetent Egyptians. The increasing awareness of his loss inspired Pharaoh to recapture his human property. Fortuitously, his C.I.A. located the two million miscreants, not 100-150 miles away, and fleeing hourly deeper into desert fastness, but encamped—what fools they were—not twenty miles east of the city on the shore of the impassable Sea of Reeds, apparently confused and obviously leaderless.
Recklessly courageous at the news, Pharaoh sent his warriors to avenge the death of loved ones and to corral and return like cattle to servitude Hebrews they considered less than cattle. In force they came, to regain by force what God by force had compelled them to surrender.
That morning, as anxious Hebrew lookouts scanned the horizon, terrified eyes flew to dust clouds out of which materialized columns of chariots leading, ranks of cavalry on their flanks and battalions of infantry in support…angry, armed, ready for war.
A spectacle that pulverized the hapless slaves. But when they wailed their despair to God, he coldly replied, Go Forward! Which made no sense at all. Forward?...into the Sea? Did God consider drowning an acceptable alternative to slavery? Had he added blundering to his apparent indecision, that first backtracked them from freedom into Harm’s Way, and now abandoned them between deep waters and thundering armies?
The Application
Consider two reasons God repositioned Israel from safety to danger.
First, Military Necessity.
God has used war for punitive and preventative purposes, sometimes in tandem. His battle with Babylonian soldiers outside Jerusalem was punitive II Kings 19:35-36. His wars against the Canaanites were both punitive and preventative. And his destruction of Pharaoh’s army was preventative. Without their destruction, armed Egyptian battalions would have systematically raided the nomads and tribe by tribe, driven them back to bondage.
Despite the chant of anti-war activists, war changes everything, definitively resolving otherwise insoluble diplomatic and political issues. War won American independence from Great Britain; banished slavery from American life; and bulldozed Nazism into history’s land-fill. None of which would have occurred without WAR.
Think of it like this: it was the effort to prevent any war in the middle 1930’s that led to World War II. Well-meaning statesmen, unwilling to lose hundreds of soldiers contesting German occupation of the Rhineland and the Sudetanland, blundered the world into a war that claimed at least thirty million lives!
In the present context…have you thought of this?...through the full year of plagues, God’s argument with Egyptian religion left Pharaoh’s army intact and untouched. And only when the king shifted his military from a defense of the country to aggression against Israel did God demolish them. Iran, Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda should take note!
Second, Spiritual Necessity.
God had specific lessons to teach Israel. First, that overcoming, not avoiding, problems empowers personal development. Indeed, we grow spiritually, intellectually and emotionally in direct proportion to the challenges faced and overcome, not those avoided or denied.
That encourages us to seek greater faith, not lesser difficulties. For confronting difficulties increases our ability to solve them as it weakens their ability to defy solution.
Second, that the previous year had proven God’s faithfulness to Israel, a past sufficiency that proved his present trustworthiness. That means we shouldn’t expect God to reprove himself every time a new crisis appears. God won’t produce new evidence or miracles when we disregard those already given. Whatever our danger or hardship, we live by faith in the God who’s always faithful. Never learning that lesson brought Israel’s fall from grace.
Third, that the solution to their crisis at the Sea lay in the future, not in the past—by going forward into the Sea, not by going back to Egypt. For if danger threatened from both directions, possibility existed only by going forward.
That challenges us not to be impaled on past mistakes, lost years, still-born dreams and shattered relationships, but to GO FORWARD with God despite them. Learn with the Duke in Othello, “To mourn a mischief that is past and gone is the next way to draw more mischief on.”
Columbus went forward and discovered a new world; Einstein went forward and formulated a new theory of the physical universe; Eisenhower went forward and liberated the European continent; Hilton went forward and founded a world-wide hotel chain—and no success was guaranteed any as they proceeded.
Our decision may not be so breath-taking, but it will be no less useful to our daily life. For if Kierkegaard was right in saying that life can only be understood backwards, it can only be lived forward.
“Tell the people to go forward” is always God’s commission when we face difficulty—though that commission is strictly a believer’s promise. The Egyptians went forward, and found calamity—but God issued no orders for them to proceed. Indeed, if people aren’t in the will of God, disaster supervenes whether they go forward, backward, sideways, up, down or in circles.
Where every direction poses problems for unbelievers, FORWARD offers opportunities for Christians. Not only because the past can’t be changed; and not only because deliverance lies ahead, but if we return to yesterday, what do we find but memories? As Somerset Maugham said, “no day is so dead as the day before yesterday.” But yesterday is just as dead.
Mountain man Jim Bridger lived with his daughter in Missouri when he grew old and blind. He would often stand in the backyard and, seized with reminiscence, look westward—to a world he had known so well, but would never see again. Like ghostly phantoms, memories mounted their steeds and galloped through his mind—of discoveries he made, of sights he first saw of all white men, of dangers he faced and survived. Memories…that couldn’t be taken from him…memories…that could never be made into MORE.
Unlike the Christian life. For even as we presently explore every dimension of Jesus Christ, we’re only on Heaven’s frontier, not in its backyard. We’re anticipating greater discoveries still, not exhausting those already found. We’re fixed on future certainties, not obsessed with past recollections. With the apostle we embrace Philippians 3:13-14. By forgetting what is behind, and straining strain toward what is AHEAD—we PRESS ON.
As Allied POW’s in World War II discovered. When Singapore fell to the Japanese in February, 1942, English and Commonwealth troops suddenly saw behind them a freedom they couldn’t regain and before them savage captivity they couldn’t avoid. But by GOING FORWARD they began to read the Gospels and Epistles and, in the spiritual renewal that flourished, performed prodigies of faith in death-infested River Kwai camps. They won men to Christ, formed orchestras, conducted classes, performed concerts and plays, invented medicines and medical instruments, gave blood transfusions and prayed for their tormentors.
Impossible obstacles were overcome by GOING FORWARD; by putting effort into solutions instead of self-pity.
If you have a decision to make, and you don’t know what direction to go, GO FORWARD WITH GOD. He controls the future, and has plans for us there as we advance with him. But do it now. Don’t procrastinate it to later.
If you’re starting late as a Christian, never mind: better late than never. In 1984, two immigrants swore their allegiance to the United States when they received citizenship papers. They had waited 40 years for the opportunity and were 79 and 74 respectively. Most people, at such ages, would consider citizenship in a new land too hard to achieve. They didn’t; they felt that United States citizenship was worthwhile, even if they didn’t get it till late.
Coming to Christ is like that. In fact nothing is better than coming to Christ, however late in life. As nothing will ever be worse than being without him when we die. It’s never too late to become the child God seeks from us or to have the church Christ envisioned when the Holy Spirit came on Pentecost.
If you’ve delayed doing something necessary, and you think there’s no reason to do it now, don’t linger…Go Forward. If you’ve failed repeatedly, never mind. Go forward; today’s obedience excels yesterday’s mistakes. One day living with Jesus compensates for a lifetime of living alone. And if you’re facing weakening health or terminal disease, it isn’t all over; GO forward, for Christians always have a future that’s far superior to their present life, however excellent and fruitful.
In her autobiography, Agatha Christie wrote of the danger of going back as an adult to a place that childhood remembered. Never do it, she implored, never go where you had been happy as a child. If you don’t, it remains ALIVE to you. If you do, you KILL it.
Well…I’m not sure about that. But this is true: since we can’t go back to anything but memories, we should instead Go Forward with God to LIFE in his Son.
