Of course, the children of Israel were safely, then, on the other side and did not lose a person as far as we know.
It is for this very reason that we see in chapter 14 that in Exodus 15, verse 3, Moses said, The Lord is a man of war. He saw Him at work, and he praised Him in this song of Moses as the great Warrior of Israel, who would fight for them and give them victory.
Now, this episode in Exodus 14 sets down several of the common factors that occur when God acts as a warrior. It is kind of a little template, we could call it, about how God works. And we will go into the reasons in a minute.
But oftentimes, as in this one, God allows His people to get into a situation that they cannot overcome, or maybe put it another way, where only He can overcome the situation. And then He promises to fight for them and tells them not to fear. Don't worry, I'm here. I can fight your battles for you.
And He watches over His people. He is very mindful of them. He makes sure that they do not come to harm and gives them proper instruction. And then He leads the enemy into a trap that He springs, and He miraculously decimates them. And after that, His people come out on the other side essentially unscathed and free to carry on without fear of their enemy because they have been totally destroyed. He does this time and time again.
Now verse 14, which we read, The Lord will fight for you, and you shall hold your peace. is the first instance in which God promises to fight for His people appears. So this is the first time we see this promise in the Bible. Moses somehow - probably because he had a better relationship with God and more intense than we understand from what we get in the Bible - but he understood this principle and knew that God's intervention would be the only way that they would survive against Pharaoh and his army, so he figured God had a reason He was leading them to Sinai.
He was going to give them His law, so God would have to get them out of this. And that is how it turned out. If you look, you do not even have to read between the lines here, Israel did nothing for this victory to occur unless, well, I guess you could call walking nothing compared to actually having to fight or defend themselves and their property as they were escaping, but that is all they did.
They walked across the Red Sea and came out on the other side. God did everything else. He held off the Egyptians with the pillar of fire, and He let them come in to the Red Sea, to the dry land, and then He said, Moses, raise that rod, and the waters came back and killed all the Egyptians. So the Israelites did not have to do anything but walk across that dry land, that miraculous dry land, which it looked like it would fall in on them at any time. In faith they had to get through that. A little bit of test of faith, and God did all the rest.
The event which we see here in Exodus 14 is a type of Christ's victory over Satan. And how much did you have to do for Christ to claim victory over Satan? You did not have to do anything. He did all of that.
All we have to do when we accept Christ as our Savior is tantamount to what the Israelites did in walking across the Red Sea. We have to show a little bit of faith and move forward, and that is why it is very clear that the Red Sea miracle is a type of baptism. When we are initiated, if you will, into the Body of Christ and accepted the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and our sins are put away.
So this has, of course, very much to do with us and understanding how God works so that we can apply this in our own lives in a spiritual way. God is still willing to fight for us just as He was for the Israelites back 3,500 years ago. So the writers of the Old Testament understood this, that this event in Exodus 14 was uber-significant to God's plan, and they speak about it frequently.
In the Psalms and in the Prophets they are always alluding to this Red Sea crossing because it was so significant in setting down … . . .
Meanwhile the waters formed a wall on the right, and on the left. According to Psalm 78:13, the Lord 'made the waters stand up like a heap.'
Sometime during the morning watch, the Lord looked down. In Scripture, this look is never just visual, but a demonstration of some wrath or mercy on God's part. From the pillar of fire and cloud, the Lord looked down at the Egyptian army as they began to pursue Israel across the recently formed valley in the sea, and threw it into confusion.
'God is not the author of confusion,' so the confusion came from the Egyptians themselves, whose minds became terrified leading to their confused state. God troubled the Egyptians with panic attacks. The army panicked, and became disarrayed, when God's presence became apparent, and they realized that they were up against a superior Challenger, and an overwhelming force.
This look of God took on concrete proportions, because the pillar of fire must have suddenly lit up the sky, with such a flash in the darkness that the chariots careened against one another. The horses were probably one on top of the other, as they scrambled to get away, and the chariots were probably tipping over. Meanwhile there was also unleashed such a spectacular display of thunder, lightning, rain, and earthquake, that the boldest and most arrogant of Egypt's charioteers were struck with terror.
By this time, the thoroughly distracted Egyptians had another problem: God made the chariot wheels come off, or jam against one another, so that the Egyptians had difficulty driving. They had enough, and were willing to forget about Israel altogether, but it was too late.
The Lord had begun His fight against Egypt as was promised. Israel had nothing to do at this point other than stand still and watch the victory won on their behalf; because with the upraised hand of Moses, the walls of water cascaded toward each other to resume their place, just as dawn broke.
Pharaoh lost all the men and chariots that he had committed to that engagement. The text never says that Pharaoh himself died here, even though Psalms 136:15, records that God "overthrew Pharaoh and his army in the Red Sea."It leaves some doubt as to whether he was actually killed, or not. I have a note in my Bible, from the class at Ambassador College, Old Testament Survey; it says that Pharaoh lived for sixteen years after the destruction of his army. So, it is questionable, it is not firmly a fact, of whether he lived or not, but it appears in history that he lived for another sixteen years. But, when you look at Psalm 136:15, it seems to indicate that everyone died. Either way, he got the point that God is Sovereign.
So while the Israelites walk across this dry causeway, God stays behind to harry the Egyptians, to slow them down, to keep them from plunging into the sea after the stragglers. He made their chariots hard to drive, and some commentators think that perhaps God allowed some of the water to start seeping back in along the road that they were taking—the dry causeway was now getting wet again—and it was causing them to drive in mud. And the mud, being sticky and all that way mud is when it starts to get deep, they could not drive their chariots quickly and it would very easily allow the wheels to pop off the axles.
He could have done it another way, that is just what they are thinking, to try a naturalistic way of working. It might have been that He just went down there with a bunch of angels and said, "Hey, start popping wheels," and all these chariots just fell down in the dirt and could not go anywhere. They were sleds now. Maybe, maybe not. But it is interesting that He went back there and He kind of had fun confusing that Egyptian army. He was going to show them, each individual Egyptian in that army, that he was at God's mercy at any time because He was in control of this situation.
He made the horses rear and balk. He put fear into the men and they soon became aware that pursuing Israel was a bad idea, but they were already between the walls of water, and when they came to this decision that they needed to get out of there, they turned and they fled as fast as they could back toward the western shore. But the Hebrew says that when they turned to flee back west, that the water began coming back in from the west, in their faces, so that they were here marching east, God harries them, they turn around to face the west to get out, and they could see the walls of water just bending in over there fellows who were in front of them, and the wave came right at them, in their faces. There was no escape. So it says there none lived to take the news back to the capital city, that the entire army was dead. "Snap" just like that. All those beautiful 600 chariots, all the other ones that were not as beautiful, all the horseman, all the horses, all the soldiers, everyone dead, not a one left standing, gone.
Maybe the most significant thing that is in that entire chapter (at least to this sermon) is in the very last sentence, especially the last part. "The people feared the LORD, and believe the LORD and His servant Moses." This is interesting. Once Israel experienced their deliverance from the Egyptians, they saw their enemy totally destroyed. They saw them wash up on the seashore there. They saw this tremendous miracle that God had worked for them. Then, they were ready to fear and believe. That is to give the proper respect and reverence to God, and to believe God and Moses. It was not just God. It was Moses too. God was there, but Moses was the one they were following. They saw Moses.
God causes the wheels of the chariots to fall off, and the Egyptians are stuck. So they begin to flee.
That is kind of interesting. It seems as if they got confused—which God said they did—and they were fleeing the wrong direction. That is the only thing that I could think of—He so confounded them, they did not know which way to go.
Because God wanted to have honor and victory over Egypt, He tells Moses to work the miracle in the other direction. And unrestrained, millions (or, billions) of gallons of water came crashing back! It smashed the Egyptian army to smithereens. All the men died. All the horses died. And, evidently, many of them washed up on the shore; and this is what armed Israel, for their wars with Amalek (that came on, later on) and later other wars.
