Sing Of Your Salvation!

Sometimes there’s a reality so rich and so deep we can use many different words to describe it. It’s beauty and power can’t be captured by just one term. That’s the case when talking about what God has given us through our Lord Jesus. We might call it salvation. Or redemption. But it’s also forgiveness. Atonement. Justification. Or again, what we have in Christ is deliverance. It’s rescue and release!

To that long list we could add another word, perhaps less likely. And that is “exodus.” What’s an exodus? It’s an evacuation, a flight from trouble. Like the refugees that you see on news reports, running away from a country that’s been torn apart. And that’s the kind of event described throughout the second book of the Bible. Exodus recounts the Old Testament story of redemption, the exodus of God’s people from the land of Egypt. And this was no panicky rush for the emergency exits. This was the divine rescue plan: God was bringing his people away from oppression and towards peace.

And so the exodus became “the” moment in Israel’s history. Even many hundreds of years after it happened, any deliverance was compared to what had happened in Egypt. Remember the exodus! With his mighty hand and outstretched arm, God had saved them! So this event too, points us to Christ our Saviour, to his work of leading us out of the kingdom of darkness and into the kingdom of light.

Today we focus on just one moment in Israel’s exodus—the song of Miriam and the women of Israel, “Sing to the LORD, for He has triumphed gloriously! The horse and its rider He has thrown into the sea!” (v 21). I preach God’s Word to you,

Miriam and the women of Israel sing of the LORD’s deliverance:

1) Egypt’s violent pursuit

2) God’s glorious triumph

3) Israel’s festive response

1) the violent pursuit: Let’s re-cap the events that lead up to our text. The people of God were in Egypt. They ended up settling there because of Joseph; he had entered the country as a slave, and then risen to a high position in the Egyptian government. Under God’s blessing, the people had not only been preserved there, but had greatly prospered.

Problems begin when, perhaps a century later, there’s a new pharaoh in the land—a pharaoh who doesn’t remember Joseph and all the good that he did for Egypt. Instead, this pharaoh comes to see the Israelites as a possible threat. So to keep them under his thumb, he subjects the Israelites as his slaves. He lays ever-heavier burdens on them, and even begins to exterminate them, throwing their babies into the Nile.

That’s a shocking hostility from unbelievers, yet it’s familiar. Ever since Genesis 3, this has been happening, as the devil and his armies do battle with the LORD and his people. It’s still happening today. Here it is in Exodus: an attempt to wipe out the church, and the family of the Saviour, long before He can appear.

So for something like three hundred years, the Israelites suffered in slavery: a hard and hurtful existence, with the constant threat of death. But in the midst of their misery, a saviour is born: Moses, the man of God. No one notices him at first—and for the first eighty years of his life, he doesn’t do much to help. But God is preparing him. For we’re told near the beginning of this book that God is aware of the suffering of his people in Egypt: “God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob” (Ex 2:24).

And because our God doesn’t forget, because our God always “remembers” his covenant, we know that something great is about to unfold. Sure enough, the LORD appears to Moses, and sends him back into Egypt as Israel’s great Deliverer. There God performs great signs and wonders, and He inflicts terrible ten plagues on the land, in order to break Pharaoh’s stubborn will.

Finally, after one last plague—the death of Egypt’s firstborn—Pharaoh relents, and the people of Israel are allowed to leave. They’re on their way, at last en route to the Promised Land… until Pharaoh comes to his “senses.” He’s standing idly by, while his vast company of free labour heads for the desert!

And so the chase is on. In the song of Moses, we hear an echo of Pharaoh’s cruel intentions, “I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil; my desire shall be satisfied on them. I will draw my sword, my hand shall destroy them” (15:9). If Pharaoh couldn’t bring them back, then he’d kill them out there in the wilderness.

Pharaoh’s determination can serve as a warning to us—it’s a warning that our enemy Satan never gives up easily. He doesn’t go quietly. Be careful, for even after losing ground to God, Satan will always hope to inflict some damage on his way out. And watching Pharaoh run after his slaves, this might even turn out better than Satan intended! For instead of methodically destroying Israel through centuries of slavery, there might be a bloodbath on the shores of the Red Sea—quick and easy.