They had been going mostly eastward, at this time. They reached a certain point, and God said, "Moses, we're going to turn here. The most obvious route is just to keep going straight, and leave Egypt. But," He said, "Moses, I want you to have the children turn, and I want you to go south. Turn to the right hand. Go south, and camp at this particular place by the sea." What this did was that it put them in a spot. Let us go to verse 3, where God gives His reasons.
Brethren, this is an important lesson that we take away on this day. Make special note of verse 5 because it clearly states the zero-sum system that the whole world runs on. Without God's deliverance, the zero-sum game of Satan shows the way of life: somebody has to lose. According to Pharaoh, it should have been Israel. And somebody has to win. It should have been the Egyptians or the other way around.
What had happened here was that they had put themselves into kind of a boxed canyon—actually, God had led them exactly there. They had mountains on two sides, the Red Sea on the third side, and (as we will see in verse 4) the armies of Pharaoh closing in on the fourth side.
