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 … . . .
