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The moment was electric with emotion.
Before this group of two to three million people lay the waters of the Red Sea.
Behind them rose the spiraling dust from the hoofs and chariots of their former
slave-masters, the Egyptians.(1) There was no way to go forward. No way to slip
out into oblivion. As they faced their moment of challenge, they discovered
there was room to go in one only direction—backwards!
Have you lately been tempted to go
backwards? Perhaps to the “good ole days” when the prices were lower, the
journeys were shorter, the trousers were longer, the weather was better, the
pressure was lesser, the currency was stronger, the youth were kinder, the
music was softer, and the world was safer? The human mind has this amazing
ability to forget what we are meant to remember and remember what we are meant
to forget. The Israelites were no exception. They said to Moses, “Was it
because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die?
What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? Didn’t we say to you in
Egypt, ‘Leave us alone; let us serve the Egyptians? It would have been
better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!” (Exodus
14:11-12). As someone rightly said, “It took one night for God to take Israel
out of Egypt, but it took forty years to take Egypt out of Israel!”
Some years ago, my wife Miriam and I met
with a young person who came from a home that was not Christian. She had made
her commitment to following Christ and was facing pressure from her loved ones
to give up that faith. One day while under much pressure, she said, “I even
considered their persuasions for a while in my mind, but the question I could
not answer was this one: ‘To whom else can I go after knowing the Lord Jesus?’
Go back, yes, but to whom or to what?” In her reflection lies a very critical point
of uniqueness. To this young person, no other love-claim would be as real as
the one Jesus makes. No other truth as reliable and no other offer of meaning
comparable.
Return. Go back. But “to whom or to what?”
reads the telltale sign on that dead-end road!
In fact, the key word in the book of Hosea
is “return.” The prophet uses the word 22 times in his prophecy. The people of
Israel were to seriously consider the admonition, “Come let us return to
the Lord” (Hosea 6:1).
Likewise, as the Israelites stood at the
edge of the Red Sea one must not forget that they were a generation that had
witnessed the ten powerful plagues that befell Egypt. They were the very people
to whom the Lord had spoken in the words of Moses: ”I am the Lord, and I
will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from
being slaves to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with
mighty acts of judgment. I will take you as my own people and I will be your
God” (Exodus 6:6-7). They were also the very people whose
firstborns were spared on the night of the Passover and who were being led in
the wilderness by the Lord himself who had revealed himself in a pillar of
cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.
Isn’t it strange how memory works! They stood
between the waters of the Red Sea and the approaching army with so rich a faith
experience and yet conceded that life in Egypt was a better deal. One wonders
how they could forget the long years of captivity and the burdens of being
bonded laborers under the Egyptians.
Yet by contrast, isn’t it strange how God
works? God took no offence. God did not disappear. God did not pour down
judgment. Instead, God stood by an ungrateful people. All because it is not in
God’s nature to forget a promise. And wonderfully, there was one man who
believed as he raised his staff over the waters of the mighty sea.
Did Moses know how God would deal with the
laws of the physical world when he raised his staff over the sea? Did Joshua
know how God would work beyond the imaginings of architecture when they marched
around Jericho? Did Daniel know how God would deal with the natural instincts
of lions as he was lowered into the den? No they didn’t. All they knew was
their God. Today also, those who know God live not by explanations, but by
promises.
Arun Andrews is a member of the speak
team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bangalore, India.
(1) Although there is no record of the
precise number that left Egypt in the Exodus, a military census taken not long
after listed the number of men twenty years of age and older who could serve in
the army as 603,550 (Exodus 38:26). From that number, the total Israelite
population of that time has been estimated at approximately two to three
million.
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