Look Backward, But Go Forward

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.